Spiral Aurora over Icelandic Divide
2019 April 21
Spiral Aurora over Icelandic Divide
Image Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado (TWAN, StarryEarth)
Explanation: Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. In 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth’s magnetosphere so forcefully that they created the Carrington Event. A relatively direct path between the Sun and the Earth might have been cleared by a preceding CME. What is sure is that the Carrington Event compressed the Earth’s magnetic field so violently that currents were created in telegraph wires so great that many wires sparked and gave telegraph operators shocks. Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced. The featured aurora was imaged in 2016 over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth’s large Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.
看着真不错
欣赏美丽，畏惧野兽。美丽的是头顶上的极光，这里以绿色螺旋的形式出现，在风景如画的云层与明亮的月亮和背景中的星星之间看到。野兽是产生极光的带电粒子波，但终有一天，它可能会损害文明。1859年，在全世界都能看到引人注目的极光之后，来自日冕物质抛射(CME)与太阳耀斑相关联的带电粒子的脉冲强烈地撞击了地球&apos；s磁层，从而产生了Carrington事件。太阳和地球之间的一条相对直接的路径可能已经被先前的CME清除了。可以肯定的是，卡林顿事件如此猛烈地压缩了地球的磁场，以至于电源线中产生的电流如此之大，以至于许多电线引发了电报操作人员的震动。如果卡林顿级事件今天影响地球，猜测认为全球电网和电子设备可能会遭受前所未有的破坏。特征极光在2016年在冰岛的Thingvallavatn湖上拍摄到，这个湖部分地填补了地球的一个断层&apos；巨大的欧亚和北美构造板块。