V
@CatherineBabault Certainly the culture on Mastodon is much nicer than other places on the Internet.
Personally, I miss my cat terribly. She lived to be 21 and was instrumental in helping my daughter come out of her shell (she has autism).
This is Princess:
Normally, our atmosphere would harmlessly absorb the radiation, but not this time. Solar particles penetrated all the way to the ground.
"We call this a Ground Level Enhancement (GLE)," explains Dyer, "This was the biggest of the modern era, and even today nothing has come close to matching it." (A widely publicized GLE last November only amounted to 2% of the 1956 event.)
On Feb. 23, 1956, radiation sensors around the world suddenly went haywire as radiation levels spiked to values as much as 50 times normal. No one had ever seen anything like it. "The increase was so dramatic that some observers switched-off their monitors believing them to be malfunctioning," says Dyer.
The radiation came from "McMath Region 3400"--an enormous sunspot spanning 60° in solar longitude, which flared just seconds before the particles arrived.
From www.spaceweather.com:
70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 1956 GROUND LEVEL EVENT: It doesn't have a catchy name, and most people have never heard of it. Yet space scientist Clive Dyer of the Surrey Space Centre can't stop worrying about 'GLE05'--a major solar radiation storm in 1956.
"Today is the 70th anniversary of that extreme space weather event," says Dyer. "If it happened again today, it would have a significant impact on air travel and modern technology."
