Solar Flare Creates Puzzling Particle Pulse on Earth; Mysterious Booms Heard in Four Michigan Counties
(May 31) Scientists are now puzzling over how a moderate solar flare on May 17 caused our planet to ‘pulse’ in response. It should not have happened, and now scientists are trying to unravel what complex processes produce the extremely energetic particles that are registered on the ground.
Major solar flares, flashes of light at various wavelengths often associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are known to disrupt communications and can even trip power grids on Earth. But the May 17 flare was an unimpressive M-class event – relatively common and not expected to create disturbances on the surface of Earth. Yet either the flare or the CME generated a ground-level enhancement (GLE), a blast of high-energy particles that lit up ground stations called neutron monitors on Earth, for the first time in nearly six years.
Scientists don’t know if the extremely energetic particles registered on the ground are the results of a shockwave in front of a CME or if the particles come from the solar flare itself. They are now analysing the data using a satellite which scans an range of bizarre particles invisible to other spacecraft – PAMELA, a European spacecraft dedicated to watching rays from space. Until more data become available, May 17 event remains a mystery – how the high-energy particles morphed on their way to Earth and resulted in the mysterious GLE. (Source)
Between 10:30 PM on Sunday night, May 27, 2012, and the next morning at 8:30 AM local time in four counties of southwestern Michigan, something highly strange caused booms loud enough to provoke residents to call police and fire departments. The reports came in from people in Calhoun, Branch and Kalamazoo Counties. Residents said it was like a huge clap of thunder in a clear, dry sky.
In Kalamazoo County, something completely scrapped two parallel 60-feet-tall trees off at the same height and laid them side-by-side. 15 to 20 feet of the tree stump was still standing and the remaining maybe 30 to 40 feet of each tree were lying in the driveway of John Nieuwenhuis, snapped off cleanly. “Then all of a sudden, this house just shook, which led me to believe there was an explosion inside, so I thought something blew up in my basement.” Nieuwenhuis’ house is located on 17 acres of woods. (Source)
As we shared earlier, the simplest explanation is the Sun-Earth connection. These events are indicative of significant increase in solar activity and the intensification of energy processes in the Earth’s core. Solar activity plays a role both directly (electromagnetic noise emitted from auroras and radiation belts) and indirectly: Intense solar storms–> large amount of energy absorbed by the earth’s crust due to earth’s weakening magnetic field –> the earth’s core heats up –> the earth’s crust starts the process of breaking apart from the shifting of the inner core against its mass –> the planet opens relief fissures to handle the pressures exerted –> sinkholes, mysterious sounds –> earthquakes, volcanic eruptions etc.
Reblogged this on The PlanetWatcher.