Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Could a solar flare wipe out humanity?

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Daniel and Jorge explain the physics of our chaotic Sun and why its so hard to predict whether or not it might kill us! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. It's like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Simone Boyce, host of the Brightside podcast. And on this week's episode, I'm talking to Olympian, World Cup champion, and podcast host, Ashlyn Harris. my worth is not wrapped up in how many things I've won because what I came to realize is

I valued winning so much that once it was over, I got the blues and I was like, this is it. For me, it's the pursuit of greatness. It's the journey. It's the people. It's the failures. It's the heartache. Listen to the bright side on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, Jorge, as a parent in Southern California, I assume you have a healthy stash of sunscreen. Oh, yeah. We have about 197, partially used containers of it that you seem to multiply. I know the feeling. Well, what's the strongest sunscreen that you have? The one that you use on your kids when you're going outside and a really bright day. Well, mostly, I put hats on them. That's important. But in terms of SBF, I think it's like $100, $60,000, something like that. Too bad you don't know a particle physicist who can hook you up with some stronger stuff.

Oh, boy. You have better sunscreen? Yeah, we just wrap everything in meters of concrete. You wrap your children in concrete? That would be a heavy day at the beach there. I wrap my particle physics experiment in much more protection than I wrap my children. Hmm. At least it's a concrete solution. It's a solid way to go.

Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist at UC Irvine, and I spend plenty of time at the beach. Oh yeah? What do you do at the beach? Do you swim? Do you frolic with the dolphins? Do you build sandcastles, sculptures? I mostly just marveled the fact that I get to live in such a beautiful place, a place where other people travel to go on vacation. It's just 10 minutes away. And I thought, you know, if I lived here, maybe I would just never go to the beach. But no, I actually go pretty often. I think the pictures you've posted about going to the beach. You just sit there reading physics papers.

It's the best place to read physics papers. Well, that means you're not in the ocean. Everybody enjoys something different about the beach, man. There's something in it for everybody. I see. It's like grains of sand. And anyway, have you been in the Pacific recently? It's cold.

Also full of oil right now. There's an oil spill going on right now right where you live. That's true. There was recently an oil pipeline berth in Huntington Beach a few miles up the coast from us, but pretty sad. Well, anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard radio. In which we put your brain on the beach so that it can contemplate this incredible and crazy universe that we find ourselves in. We extend our minds from the shores of earth to the edges of black holes all the way down to the core of suns and the early history of the universe.

We think about everything that has happened, everything that couldn't happen, everything that might happen, and everything that will happen in the universe. And we try to wrap it all up in a 45-minute podcast full of silly dad jokes and explain it all to you. Yeah, because it is a pretty happening universe. It feels like there's always something going on in this universe. It's never a boring universe. And so we like to talk about all those amazing things out there for us to wonder at an awe ad and makes us feel cosmically connected to everything. And also, all the things that could potentially kill us. That's right, because when you look out into space, it seems like sort of a calm place,

right? It's cold. It almost seems frozen. Like those stars that are up there are probably the same stars that you're great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great. grandparents looked at when they looked up at the stars and their distant ancestors. And yet we know that the universe is actually chaotic and dynamic and sort of insane and that crazy things can and do and will happen in the universe. Crazy things that might even wipe out humanity. Yeah. And so it'd be nice to sort of know about them a little bit ahead of time or at least

understand as it's, you know, destroying humanity. At least we would know a little bit about what's going on. I mean, that would be tragic not to know what happened. in those last few moments. You'd like to understand the apocalypse as it happens. So you're like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what Daniel predicted. I don't want to pass on confused. That seems like the worst date to do it in.

Wow, that's a whole deep topic. Is it better to die ignorant or to understand what's happening to you? Boy. Yeah, you don't want to have that, like, face in your coffin where you're like, you want to have a calm, serene, you know, zen look about you. Yeah, and there's another possibility that understanding the universe and its threats might actually let you prevent that from happening, might actually save you and your children

and let us prepare ourselves against these coming cataclysms. Wait, you mean physics can be useful? I try my hardest to be irrelevant, but sometimes despite my best intentions, I do do something useful. Maybe we should retitled the podcast into the, you know, Humanity Survival Podcast. Daniel and Jorge save the world.

Daniel and Jorge explain how to survive in the apocalypse. Somehow that would be an even more, ambitious and less humble title than the one we already have. Yeah, somehow we managed to put up a high bar for that. But yeah, we like to talk about all the amazing things in the universe and all the things that may potentially kill us. And one of those things that may spell the demise of the human rays could be right here in our backyard.

We live in a nice neighborhood, the solar system. It's a nice place to raise kids and to have life and to evolve and all of that stuff. But there are also lots of dangers lurking. We did an episode about the probability of an asteroid, or a comet coming to hit the earth and wiping out humanity. But that's not the only source of danger. The very thing that gives us life that powers everything on Earth might also one day fry us.

So today on the podcast we'll be talking about would humanity survive a massive solar flare? Now flare I mean, I guess you mean like fire flare, not like having flare. The sun is pretty snazzy, right? Yeah, it's a cool. Well, it's not cool. It's pretty hot, but it does have flare for sure.

It does. I don't think that there's any level of solar snaziness, however, which would be a danger to humanity. We wouldn't all look up one day and be like, oh my gosh, that's just so impressive and then keel over. I don't think that's possible. It's sense of style is blinding. It's so bright. It's brilliant. Its fashion is brilliant.

But yeah, so the sun could kill us. I mean, it's solely responsible for life on Earth, for sure. I mean, without the sun, we wouldn't be here, right? Like, we need the sun for life, for heat, for energy, for food, for everything. Yeah, it's an incredible source of energy for us, but it's also a crazy turbulent monster. It's an ocean of bubbling plasma. And it's incredible, you know, you can feel the heat of this fire across almost 100 million miles. Like, you ever been to a campfire and then your kids, like, put too much wood on it and it grows momentarily, like, so big.

you got to back up. And even just like taking a foot or two step backwards, suddenly it feels much, much cooler. That's because the intensity drops very quickly with distance. It's like the radius squared. So now imagine a fire so strong, so hot, so intense that you have to take 100 million miles worth of steps backwards. And yet you can still feel its heat across that distance of space. That's an incredible fire that's burning up there in the sky. Yeah. And even that far, it powers everything on Earth, basically. All the plants and animals, we're all here moving around because of the sun that far away. And yet we're so sensitive to it operating at exactly a certain level.

Like if it cranked up 10% in its brightness, it would throw everything off on Earth. If it went down a few percent, we would all be very, very chilly. So we rely on the sun being where it is and not changing its performance basically ever. I guess because, you know, life evolves here on Earth kind of in sync with the sun, right? Like if the sun had been at another level, then life would have evolved totally differently. And we would be maybe have thicker skin or live underground maybe more. Yeah, life would have evolved to match whatever circumstances were here. But, you know, if it was really variable, if the sun got like 50% hotter every other year, 50% colder,

that would be a real challenge. And it might be that life could evolve to live in such weird circumstances, but it might not be, right? Some circumstances you just can't survive. Like if the sun is constantly bathing you with sterilizing radiation, it might be that life just never kicks off. Or the market fluctuations for the sunscreen industry would be all over the place. Those poor investors. Oh my gosh. Mr. Copperton would be out on the street. Yeah.

What would he do without his third and fourth vacation homes? I mean, seriously, is that even really life? That seems inhumane. But yeah, this was actually a question from a listener from the Netherlands. Colin had a question about how back can a sunboard get? That's right. This is a question that came, I think, on Twitter from Colin, who was wondering, like, could something happen on the sun or in the sun, which emits so much crazy radiation that it could actually wipe out humanity. Right. Because I guess the sun is kind of volatile, right? And not exactly predictable. I mean, it's a giant swirling ball of nuclear fusion explosions.

Yeah, it's exactly not predictable. You know, we do not understand the sun. There are basic things about the sun, like the fact that it has an 11-year cycle. it gets hotter and colder and brighter and dimmer and the magnetic field flips that we just don't understand the very basics of. But it's not like it's easy. You know, it's a huge ocean of plasma. And plasma is extraordinarily complex to model because it's very strong, very powerful interactions. So to really understand what's happening, you have to like really understand how everything is pushing on everything else and simultaneously 100 trillion particles all moving together. It's a very complicated thing to understand. Yeah. And hopefully something we can understand in the future otherwise we might be toast literally we wouldn't be toast we'd be

the thing that they spread on toast we would be the soft buttery spread no i guess you'd call a humarmite or something all right well as usual we were wondering how many people out there had the same question as colin or had thought about whether the sun could or could not flare up and kill us all so daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people could a massive solar flare wipe out humanity. And thank you to everybody who participated. If you would like to get deep, dark, pessimistic questions from a random physicist online in your inbox, then please write to us to questions at Danielanthorhe.com. I'll send you the questions right back. You can record them at home on your phone or computer however you like and send them right back to us. It's easy.

It's free. You get to be on the podcast. So think about it for a second. Here's what people had to say. I think a massive solar flare could definitely wipe out humanity. I don't think it would be directly. I think it would be, like, for example, it would maybe ignite fire in our forests, making it hard for us to breathe. And then it would happen that we would go extinct because of that. It would definitely break our technology and satellites in space, but that wouldn't theoretically wipe us out. But I think the aftermath of it, depending on how massive it is, it could definitely. make us fight for our lives somehow?

I'd say yes, a massive solar flare is able to wipe out humanity. We have the mandatory shield to protect us right now, but if that changes or if it weakens or if the flare is like really, really huge, whopper of a flare, then, yeah, I guess it should be powerful enough to wipe out the human race. The sun is massive, so compared to the Earth. yeah, I guess it should be possible. It depends on your definition of massive. If a solar flare was massive in the true physics sense of the term, then that mass would

have enough force and by proxy enough energy that when it reaches Earth, it could at least damage Earth in some way. And I suppose a massive enough solar flare could wipe out. all living things on earth. All right. Doesn't look good for humanity here. Popular opinion doesn't seem to think too highly of the sun's safety. I think people are just looking up and realizing,

oh my gosh, think about how close we are to this crazy intense monster that we're trusting it to behave itself. Yeah. And what if you get caught out without a parasol or a hat, right? Exactly. Or, you know, we do have some protection, but really how strong is that

and could it survive when the sun doesn't behave itself? So usually the sun is just sitting there kind of exploding or burning or churning or, you know, diffusing and I mean glowing, but sometimes it has something that's called a solar flare. So let's get into that, Daniel. What exactly is a solar flare? Yeah, solar flare is essentially an intense period of radiation from the sun. Now, the sun, of course, always pumping out radiation. This fusion going on in the sun, which heats up this plasma to incredible temperatures.

And then the sun glows at its surface, which means it's shooting off lots of. photons, but also it's shooting off protons and electrons and all sorts of stuff. That's the kind of stuff we call the solar wind. So the reason it's dangerous to be out in space, for example, even on a calm day of solar weather, is because the solar wind is a huge amount of radiation. And so if you're out there for too long, you just have these streams of particles passing through your body, potentially messing up your DNA and giving you cancer. So like on a calm day, the sun is already pumping out a lot of radiation. And we're normally protected from that radiation, because we have a magnetic field and we have an atmosphere.

So that's like a shield and a blanket that protect us from the solar radiation. So usually we are getting bombarded by radiation from the sun, but it's okay. Or like at least life has sort of gotten used to it as we know it here on Earth. That's right. Some of it makes it through the magnetic field and Earth and comes down and is radiation, which, you know, happens. And that's part of why life mutates at the rate that it does. Because occasionally a crazy particle from the sun will make it all the way down and hit,

your ancestor's DNA and make you a little stronger or make your hair a little darker or make your eye change a little color or make it in you a little smarter or something. And so that contributes to natural selection. And that's good. And that's not just from the sun. We also get cosmic rays from other stars and from other parts of the galaxy and maybe even extra calactic. We don't know. But so there's all sorts of radiation coming down from space. And that's just sort of like the background, the basics, right? But what we're interested in is when the sun isn't just sort of like cooking along on a quiet day when it acts out. when it does something a little different.

So one thing it can do is something called a solar flare, which is just like an intense, localized burst of radiation. And, you know, this can last for minutes. It can last for hours, but it can shoot out a lot of radiation towards the Earth. I see. It's not just like UV rays that are dangerous. It's actually shooting all kinds of stuff out and showering us with it.

Exactly. And there's two categories of this kind of thing. There's a solar flare. Then there's also something else called a coronal mass ejection. A solar flare is mostly radiation. You get extra protons and photons and gamma rays, but sometimes what happens on the sun is that it's sort of like you get like a bubble burst, like a burp or something. Sort of like imagine watching like really good, really thick tomato sauce bubble, right?

The surface of it is usually just like sit in there bubbling quietly. But occasionally you get like a bubble forms and a splat and it sprays like your kitchen with a little droplets of tomato sauce, right? Same sort of thing happens on the surface of the sun. sometimes the magnetic fields get a little twisted and caught up, and there's a little bit of a burp or a bubble bursting. It can actually eject real plasma out into space, like basically a scoop of the sun itself.

The plasma of the sun gets sent out into space. And this is called a coronal mass ejection. So you have the solar flare, and then you have the coronal mass ejection. We don't really understand if they're related, if they're parts of the same thing, but the coronal mass ejection is much more dangerous. Seems a little rude of the sun to be burping in our direction without covering its mouth Maybe we need to invent like massive solar antacids Yeah, or send it to etiquette school, you know

Solar etiquette school I see you think you should be burping the direction of another planet Should be at least covering its mouth, I don't know So you think like a cosmic napkin is the solution to this problem Yeah, there you go, we can build that, right? You can build anything I'll call my favorite engineer and ask them about it Yeah, a giant concrete napkin in space

But yeah, so it seems like you're saying there are two things. One is a solar flare, which is just like we notice a huge spike in the radiation from the sun. And then there's something else, which is like an actual process we're aware of, which is like when the sun burps or where there's like a bubble in the sun. Those are two different things. Those are two different things that we observe. They might be parts of the same process. We just don't really understand. Usually a coronal mass ejection also has solar flares associated with it, but solar flares don't always lead to coronal mass ejections. And sometimes the connection between them is hard to understand.

You know, this is just like we are observing. We are writing stuff down in our notebooks. We do not have a great theory for what's going on inside the sun that can predict these things at all. We're just like really in the very early days of trying to develop models for the inside of the sun. And so we don't understand these. They might be part of a larger phenomenon. They might not.

Interesting. So sometimes there are unexplained spikes in radiation from the sun is what you're saying. Like we don't know where they're coming from. Yes, all the time. Like every single one is unpredicted. Like we see them, we're like, oh, well, look what's happening. It's not like somebody can tell you next week there's a good chance of a coronal mass injection. It just happens and we observe it and we write it down and we hope that the scientists can eventually figure out what causes it and maybe even one day predict them.

Now, are these related to, you know, when you see pictures of the sun, you see like these like loops of plasma or arcs of plasma that kind of, you know, go up and then back down into the sun. Are those the coronal mass ejections? Coronal mass ejections are like those. There are these big loops that form and then burst. But the dangerous thing is when they burst and they send the blob of plasma out into space. A lot of those loops just collapse and go back into the sun. What's really dangerous is when the magnetic fields get twisted

in such a way that they snap and they send that plasma out instead of it collapsing back in. And it doesn't always have to be dangerous for us. Like it can send a coronal mass ejection out towards Jupiter and just miss us, right? it's not often that one of these will actually wash over the earth because we are a tiny target far away but sometimes it will it's like an actual piece of the sun that it shoots out yeah exactly just like that bubble on your tomato sauce is made of actual hot scalding tomato sauce right the same way this coronal mass ejection is like a scoop of the sun that's been sent out into space all right well let's get into what might be causing these coronal mass ejections or solar flares and what the dangers are but first let's take a quick break A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind

the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching. I won't say white watch because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah.

But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway.

We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. We talked about her. recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like,

you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college super star A. Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I'm Simone Boys, host of the Brightside podcast, and on this week's episode, I'm talking to Olympian, World Cup champion, and podcast host, Ashlyn Harris.

My worth is not wrapped up in how many things I've won, because what I came to realize is I valued winning so much that once it was over, I got the blues, and I was like, this is it. For me, it's the pursuit of greatness. It's the journey. It's the people. It's the failures. It's the heartache. Listen to the bright side on the I-Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about solar flares, which are intense outbursts of radiation from the sun. And these can be pretty powerful, right, Daniel? They're like, you know, megaton-level bursts of energy.

It's an enormous amount of energy. Some of these have the equivalent of like 10 billion megaton bombs. 10 billion like Hiroshima bombs. Yes, it's an incredible amount of energy. Like billions of tons of material from the sun gets shot out into space. And you know, the sun doesn't even notice, right? It's like a tiny, tiny, tiniest fraction of the sun has no impact on the mass of the sun. But, you know, it's significant compared to the Earth.

Yeah, it's like maybe about the mass of the Earth kind of or more. No, the Earth is much more massive than these. but it carries enough energy to do some serious damage, something that we could really detect here on Earth. Well, you were saying earlier there are solar flares and then there are coronal mass ejections, but we don't know if they're the same thing. Do we know what's causing either of them?

We don't know what's causing either of them. We know something about the category of idea that might underlie both of them. That just has to do with understanding the dynamics of a very, very complex system, which is the sun. You know, it's basically like an ocean of plasma, but plasma is not like just a hot gas, right? You can think about how complicated a hot gas is.

It's got particles whizzing around in every direction, sometimes bouncing off each other, but gas is usually neutral. In a plasma, it's so hot that the electrons have left their little atoms and they're flying around on their own. And now the atoms also have electric charge. So everything in there doesn't just have a lot of energy. It also has charges, positives and negatives.

And so there's a lot of interactions. Now you want to understand what's going to happen. You want to think about like a particle moving through that. It's getting tugged on and pulled on by everything else in that plasma. It's a real mess. We have difficulty understanding like how a plasma works inside our fusion reactors where it's just like a single little loop of plasma. Now imagine modeling like an entire sun and it's got oceans and convection and currents inside

of it that we don't understand. Yeah. I imagine like if you have a current of, you know, positively charged ions or electrons and that's going to generate a magnetic field and then that's going to affect the flow over there and so it gets really complicated really fast. And that's exactly the right way to think about it in terms of flows. It's not just like a bubbling tomato sauce, right?

Where everything's just sort of sitting and bouncing around, it has flows in it. And we know that because those flows are charged particles, which means there are currents, which means it generates magnetic fields and the sun has a very, very powerful magnetic field. So that means that there are these currents of plasma, these incredibly vast currents of plasma, right?

Like tubes of plasma bigger than Jupiter, right? Like the width of Jupiter is small compared to the width of these currents of plasma flowing through the sun. But they're not just calmly flowing in a circle the same way year after year. They change and they swap. These are very powerful magnetic fields that sometimes get tangled up and sometimes snap and things change directions suddenly. So that's why it's not very calm and why it's very chaotic and hard to predict what's going to happen. It's kind of like the weather almost, right?

Like it's so unpredictable, anything could happen. Like a small solar butterfly could end up, you know, causing a huge solar flare on the other side of the sun. Yeah. Or imagine taking, you know, a bowl of hot spaghetti noodles, right, and jiggling them and then trying to understand like where each of them are going to end up. It's really complicated how these things interact and tangle up with each other and don't. And so to understand like when this is going to happen, we think that maybe it's connected to when this magnetic field lines. get so twisted that they have to like suddenly snap in one direction to get reoriented to like settle down. But we don't really know. Our models are not sophisticated enough to predict

when this might happen. It's just sort of like the general idea we have about what might be causing it. It's all spaghetti. Yeah. You seem to be really, I'm jonesing for some spaghetti and tomato sauce here, Daniel. Is it lunchtime? No, I was making a pizza last week and we were out of tomato sauce. And you know, I hear that everybody always says jarred tomato sauce is garbage, compared to tomato sauce you make at home. But I never really believed that until we were out of tomato sauce. But we did have cans of tomatoes. And so I was like, all right, I'll make some tomato sauce.

And then I was like, wow, this is what everybody's talking about. So now I'm hooked and I got like bubbling pots of tomato sauce in my house all the time. So yes, I got tomato sauce on the brain, I will admit. Do you have your sunglasses when you look at it? Just in case something bubbles up? I have a very powerful magnetic field so that tomato plasma doesn't enter my atmosphere. As chaotic as tomato sauce is, the sun is also a pretty cool. chaotic. It's got magnetic fields and flows. And so it's pretty unpredictable. But it's sort of

going in a cycle, right? You were telling me that the sun kind of has a cycle to it. It has an 11 year cycle and it's very regular. Right. And every 11 years, the magnetic field of the sun flips. Right. It goes like north becomes south. The south becomes north. And this is crazy. Yeah. You know, the magnetic field of the earth also flips. We covered it in a podcast. It's not something we understand very well and it happens much more irregularly. like sometimes every 50,000 years, sometimes every million years. And it hasn't happened in a long, long time. But on the sun, it happens every 11 years like clockwork.

And this 11 year cycle is also connected to like the intensity of the sun and the frequency of these solar flares and these coronal mass ejections. So there's some like very powerful 11 year cycle going on inside the sun that determines how everything operates. Interesting. It's like a clock. That's weird. And we don't know the source of it. And so on Earth, we sort of know that the magnetic field of the, of our planet is due to the iron and the molten core kind of rotating and flowing.

But what's happening in the sun? The sun doesn't have like iron in the middle, does it? I mean, it has some iron, I imagine, but not that much. But it doesn't have to be iron. All you need are currents, right? To get a magnetic field, what you need are currents in motion. Charged particles moving create magnetic fields. And so even just protons, right, the sun is mostly protons and electrons.

You can think of it as hydrogen, but it's plasma. So those protons and electrons in the hydrogen atom have broken apart. So it's mostly just a huge swarm of protons and electrons. And those things in motion are a current, and those currents in loops will generate magnetic fields. In the same way that ionized metal inside the earth is swarming around creating magnetic fields, plasma of protons and electrons inside the sun is doing the same thing, but much more powerfully. But I guess it's weird because you're saying it's totally chaotic and unpredictable, but we know it's also doing it in an 11-year cycle. So there must be some predictability about it.

There's definitely some predictability, and we should be able to figure it out eventually. We just haven't. Like we can't predict it. But, you know, like everything in the universe, at one level, it's a chaotic, buzzing insanity that can't possibly describe in simple terms. But there's always a way to tell like an approximate mathematical story about it and to say like, here are the most important bits or, here we can boil it down to this and that we can describe. And so, you know, while there are bits of it that we can't predict that are always going to be chaotic, there are also elements of it that we think we will be able to predict because,

as you say, there are regular patterns there that we hope to be able to, like, connect it to our mathematical ideas. And that's in the end what physics is, is taking this crazy chaotic universe and trying to boil it down, summarize it, using approximate mathematical stories. Right. That's pretty cool. You were saying that sometimes the sun just has these flares where there's increased radiation and sometimes it's not due to these bubbles in the sun.

So do we have any ideas about what might be causing these outbursts of radiation? Is it just the whole sun suddenly burns brighter for some reason? Yeah, so the solar flares are also still localized. It's not like the entire sun gets brighter. There's like spots on the sun which generate intense bursts of radiation. But again, that's not something we understand. Sometimes these are connected to kernel mass injections, but sometimes they're not. So the solar flare is not like the entire sun getting brighter all of a sudden.

It's like spots of the sun getting brighter. And solar astronomers, people who look at the sun, you can see these things. I mean, don't look at the sun unless you have special technology for dimming it. But if you watch the sun, you can see these dots form sometimes. And those are solar flares of intense patterns of localized radiation from the sun. Yeah, I think we're used to in our heads of thinking of the sun as this like, you know, bright, this that's one color and it's homogenous and it's burning but it's actually like if you look at pictures of the sun it's pretty textured like has a ton of texture to it and you can see

all kinds of swirling patterns on it if you look at the red photograph of it yeah it's really kind of beautiful actually it's incredible it's just like a big ocean you know not a tomato sauce but of plasma and it's quite gorgeous to watch actually all right well let's get into the danger of the solar flares you know we joke around that you need extra sunblock but if it's Big enough you, that probably won't help you. Yeah, that's right. These things can be really significant. Now, the solar flares probably won't do like any damage to Earth because the magnetic fields

we have and the atmosphere are likely to protect us. But these coronal mass injections, they represent a significant danger because if their magnetic field is oriented in the right way, you can sort of slip between the lines of our magnetic field and it can really wash over the earth and dump a lot of energy. And this is not hypothetical, like this has happened in the past, in recent recorded history. Yeah, actually in like the last couple of centuries, right? Yeah, one of these things hit Earth in 1859, this enormous mass of energy hit the Earth. And it was a guy named Carrington, who was actually watching the sun just before this happened.

And he was like noting these sunspots. And he noticed a bunch of big sunspots more than he'd ever seen before. And then a couple of days later, telegraph networks across the Earth started to do. go crazy like sparks were flying from people's telegraphs and people who were touching wires got shocked and there was so much energy in these things that it created like an artificial dawn people like got up and thought oh the sun is coming up even though it's like two in the morning and they got up and like started to make breakfast and stuff it was like a major event people had like a religious epiphanies it's like enough for people to think it was the actual sun right

like it lit up the sky yeah or they thought it was the end of days you know because it was a pretty thing like imagine not understanding anything about astronomy and seeing an eclipse right it feels like whoa something weird and mystical is happening right something in the sky something that affects the entire solar system or the universe it seems to you this is an event at that scale right middle of the night the sky is glowing and everything that's electric is like giving off sparks and shocking people like it was a crazy event and you're saying carrington kind of side coming Like, he looked at the telescope, and so the visuals of these solar flares or coronal mass ejections came before the actual coronal mass ejections.

That's right, because the coronal mass doesn't travel as fast as the solar flare. The solar flare is like light and protons traveling near the speed of light. Whereas the coronal mass ejection, it's like this bubble of the sun. It takes like a half a day, two days sometimes to get here from the sun. So he got a little bit of warning. So he saw these like bright flares have. And then boom, a couple days later, enormous event where everybody's getting shocked if they're touching something electric. I wonder they also saw a spike in like, you know, sunburns and skin cancer, you know, that in the months following that event.

I'm sure there were. Yeah. I don't think they kept records like that, but I'm sure there were because it was a huge radiation event. You know, everything around you that can conduct electricity got pushed by all the crazy intense radiation. particles coming in and hitting those wires and pushing the electrons in them, creating, you know, this physical event where, like, that energy from the sun is turned directly into electricity. It's an amazing amount of energy required to do that. And so that also happened inside your body. Wow. I wonder if it created a whole generation of superheroes, too, in 1859. That's right.

They can make butter like nobody before them. Well, and it happened not just in 1859, but also a few times in the next couple of years, right? Yeah, we had big events also in 18509. 72 and 1921, not quite as big as the original Carrington event, but it got people curious. They're like, wait a second, how often is this going to happen? So then people started digging into the historical records and looking at like rings of trees, really, really old trees to see if you can see evidence. And they found like these cedar trees in Japan that are super old that show evidence that in

775, that's like 1,300 years ago, there must have been this. massive event because it left all this extra carbon 14 on these trees. These cosmic rays hit nitrogen and broke nitrogen down into the special form of carbon. And they think based on the amount of carbon 14 in these rings that this must have been an event 10 or 20 times more powerful than this Carrington event we're talking about 150 years ago. Wow. It created carbon like it split atoms here on Earth. Yeah, absolutely. This is really crazy. intense radiation. That would be bad news if it happened today. That would be very bad news if it happened today, absolutely. It was bad news back then, but our civilization didn't have

electricity and wasn't dependent on an incredible infrastructure, which was delicate and could be knocked out by such an event. So, you know, people got a little sick or maybe they got skin cancer or whatever, but their civilization mostly survived. And look even further back in time and see evidence from ice cores of similar events because, again, it changes the chemistry of the stuff on Earth. And we think that there was an event like in 660 BC and then further back in BC there we can also see evidence for these events.

So this is not a periodic thing. It doesn't happen on a regular cycle, but it's something that happens not too infrequently in the history of our sun. Wow. It literally scars to Earth kind of, right? It leaves a memory of it. Just like a super volcano, right?

We'll leave a layer of ash in the volcanic and geological record. This frying from the sun will leave like a scar on the, the earth, which you can see thousands of years later. Like a little charing, kind of. Mm-hmm. All right, well, let's get into what the consequences of something like that happening today

would be, how bad would it be, and what we could do about it? But first, let's take another quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.

Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.

That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters, sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics

dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network

on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back.

Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all, the guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you guys. Get Your Podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Don't let biased algorithms or degree screens or exclusive professional networks or stereotypes.

Don't let anything keep you from discovering the half of the workforce who are stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time to tear the paper ceiling and see the stars beyond it. Find out how you can make stars part of your talent strategy at tear the paper ceiling.org, brought to you by opportunity at work in the ad council. All right, Daniel, exactly how much sunscreen would I need to survive one of these solar flares? Are we talking tubs? Are we talking pools of it? What can I do? Well, you should definitely not be outside when it happens. You should be inside. And, you know, these things are powerful, but it's not like the death star shooting array at the earth that's going to explode it, right?

Good, good. That's a good thing. Let's just try to put people at ease here, you know. Some people are on their commute. Some people are listening to this trying to fall asleep. We don't want to give anybody a nightmare. It's an incredible amount of energy and radiation. But mostly what's sensitive to it are things that can conduct electricity because those things absorb this energy very effectively. You mean, like, the worst it could happen will happen is, you know, the night sky might get brighter or, you know, people might get a little bit of more of a suntan.

But it wouldn't, like, blow us out, below our atmosphere away, wouldn't, like, toast half of the Earth. Yeah. It's not like that scene in Terminator where she's watching the nuclear bomb go off in her face melts or something. That's not what's going to happen. Which version of Terminator that you watch? Oh, boy. I watched the PG version. No, it's much more indirect.

Like, if you are the owner of an expensive communication satellite up in space, then probably it's going to get fried and you're out a few billion dollars. If you are up on your roof adjusting your telephone antenna when it happens, then you might get fried by the shocks from something metallic. So it's mostly going to knock out a lot of our electrical infrastructure. Why only things that are metallic, you know, like why don't trees get burned? Yeah, the energy can get deposited in trees also. But, you know, metals are just great ways to absorb this energy. because they have all these electrons floating around in these conduction bands that can absorb this energy and start to flow, right? These are charged particles coming in, so they're going to like to interact with other charged particles.

So like if you have a satellite out in space, it's going to get all these charged particles, which is going to like accumulate and cause sparks and cause your circuit to just like pop and burn out. Essentially every wire that's going to exist everywhere is suddenly going to have much more current in it than it was ever designed to have. So if you have delicate chips or capacitors or whatever, everything is suddenly going to be super high voltage. And that's not good for your electronics, right? Yeah, and not good for our society, which is like so dependent right now on phones and power grids and GPS. And that would be bad news, right? Like planes couldn't land maybe.

People would get lost on their way to the vacations. That's right. Your Tesla suddenly would have no idea how to auto drive. You have to like wake up and actually steer for yourself. Yeah. But essentially anything that's electrical is. going to have a high current passing through it. And so anything that's on is really in danger.

But if you power things off and disconnect things, then you might be safe. Oh, really? If it's off, it won't burn out? That's right. If you, like, disconnect things from these power sources, right, then you won't get a surge. Like, for example, if you disconnect your house from the electrical grid, then you're not going to get a big surge of energy because that energy comes from all that current being accumulated on those miles and miles of wire and then being delivered to your house.

But if you disconnect it, then it's just going to go to a spark on the air. I thought you meant like the radiation will come to my house from the sky, rain down, and then it will fry my circuits. But you're saying only the things that are connected to a larger grid. Things that are connected to a larger grid will have more intense surges. But, you know, everything will have something of a surge, absolutely. So every piece of fiber, every wire out there is going to get a little bit of current. But, you know, if you disconnect things, then the wires in your microelectronics won't have a chance to accumulate as much.

current. I guess I'm worried about my phone, Daniel. I'm really concerned here about my phone. Is my phone going to be all right? Yeah. So if you protect your phone, you still should be able to check Twitter. And so that's the key really is knowing that this is going to happen can allow us to do what we can to protect our most delicate electronics. So the key is prediction. If you can tell this is going to happen a couple days in advance or a week in advance or a year in advance, then you can get ready for it. Right. You could slather some sunscreen on your phone. or your, you know, digital archives to protect it. Exactly.

And that's the problem is that we don't really yet have the ability to do that. These things happen unpredictably. We don't know when the next one is going to be. Is it going to be tomorrow? Is it happening right now? Is it going to be in 100 years? We just don't know because we don't understand the sun well enough yet. But, you know, in Carrington's event,

Carrington looked at the sun, saw something, then saw the consequence of that later. Couldn't we do that now? I mean, we have telescopes that could look at the sun and couldn't we say, oh, look, it's bubbling? up. Maybe we should hide all of our phones. Yeah, but what Carrington saw is a solar flare, essentially, which doesn't always lead to a coronal mass ejection. And so while it's often connected, right? And in this case,

it clearly was, you can't, like, you know, turn off society every time you see a big solar flare coming because you're going to get a lot of false alarms. It might be good for society, though, if everyone turn up their phones more often, just to be safe and sane at the same time. That's right. Societywide camp out. Everybody go camping, turn off all lights, enjoy the stars while we let this radiation wash over us. But I guess, you know, isn't there other warning signs? You know, if it's shooting this much plasma at us, wouldn't it also, you know, have shot light towards us as well?

Like, wouldn't there be some sort of sign that precedes the actual, like, plasma coming to us? Yeah. And so if we're lucky, then there's like a solar flare at the same time pointing at us. But we don't always know that the solar flare is going to mean a coronal mass ejection. And so we can tell, we can watch the sun. We can, like, point our telescopes out of it. it and look at it. We can see the kernel mass

ejection happen before the plasma gets to Earth. So we can have like a day or two warning. But it'd be nice to have more than that, right? It'd be nice to know when these things are going to happen so we can really like batten down the hatches. Right, yeah. Well, what else are we doing about it? Are we sending any

probes out there to maybe like catch these things earlier or to study the sun more closely? We are trying to build a model of the sun from the inside out. We want to understand all the layers of the sun, you know, magnetic and all the plasma layers. And to do that, we are sending probes to get more information.

There's something called the Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 that's going to come within 10 solar radii of the center of the sun and travel at like 0.06% of the speed of light. It takes these crazy dives where it zooms in towards the sun and then goes back around the backside of it, gathering as much data as it can while it goes really, really fast, and then zooming back out again and going around Venus for another loop. It's going to do a bunch of these loops.

And it's going to take a bunch of data about what's going on close to the sun and take pictures and measure magnetic fields. And that data is absolutely critical for us to build our models of what's going on inside the sun. Because if all you know is what's happening really, really far away, it's hard to tell what's going on inside. So the more you can get close up pictures, the more we can say, oh, this model doesn't work, that model doesn't work, and we can refine our models to get better predictions of what's going on.

Interesting. It's like we have models of the weather here on Earth that are pretty good. maybe we can build like a weather model of the sun. Yes, exactly, a solar weather model, space weather model. And a lot of the models we have here on Earth are good because we've taken data inside clouds and said, what really is going on inside a cloud? What is the temperature and pressure and the wind speed inside a cloud, for example? And that's helped us understand what's going on in the same way.

We'd love to know what's going on inside the sun. But of course, we can't actually send anything into the sun and get messages out. It's sort of like an event horizon almost. But we can send stuff close to the sun. And so the ESA also has a project called the Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020 that's going to go really close to the sun. And we have a really cool solar telescope that the NSF built that's looking at the sun and trying to get like really, really fine-grained images

of the surface of the sun to image these like bubbles and loops and, you know, this turbulent flow on the surface of the sun. So it could be your job to look at the sun, basically. You could go back to your parents and be like, see, you told me not to look at the sun, but guess what I do for a living? I saved the world by staring at the sun. That's pretty cool. And I was thinking, like, that would be cool to be the first, like, solar weather person, you know?

Sounds like an easy job. You just go up to the map and be like, today is going to be sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny, and more sunny. And crazy sunny tomorrow. And, you know, we're talking about like serious radiation events and trillions of dollars in damage to satellites and infrastructure. You know, but the question really Colin had was, is this going to wipe out humanity? And I think my answer to that one would definitely be no. Like, even if we destroyed all of our technological infrastructure, people will survive. I mean, a lot of people wouldn't, but some people would survive.

Civilization would collapse. But, you know, out of the ruins, somebody would still be alive, hunting through supermarkets, eating cat food, or whatever. It's not like it's going to actually literally kill everybody. Look at the bright side. that's the bright side well that's the dark side of a bright side of the sun I guess but I mean you say it won't kill humanity but that's kind of as far as we know right

just because we haven't seen a solar flare or coronal mass ejection big enough but is it possible that in the future you could have like a giant sun burp that does maybe wipe out half of the earth it's definitely possible and we actually see that kind of stuff happening in other stars like our neighboring star

proxima centauri in 2019 it suddenly got a lot brighter than normal, like 14,000 times brighter than usual. So it was like really intensely bright. Like if you are on an Earth-like planet around Proxima Centauri at that time, then any water molecule would have gotten like split by the radiation. It really got scorched. Like the whole star got brighter, not just like a little burp on it. Yes, the whole star got brighter.

And, you know, that's a different kind of star than ours. It's a red dwarf star, which are known to be more volatile and have these like big upswing and downswings in radiation. So it's possible, though, that the same kind of thing could happen to the sun. We don't see evidence of that in the historical record, a day back tens and thousands of years, but it is possible. We don't understand the sun very well, and the timescales we're talking about are very long, and so it certainly is possible the sun could surprise us.

Yeah, it's still a relatively young sun, right? Like, it's not in its senior year. It's in its middle age about. It's like 5 billion years old, and we expect it's going to last to be about 10 billion. So, you know, it's halfway there. It's thinking about buying a sports car. Yeah, it could still have some spunk to it or unpredictability or some midlife crisis. Exactly.

All right. Well, again, another reminder of how precarious we sit in this little rock in the middle of space. Stuff can come at us out of the blue or out of the sun. It's amazing that we've been comfortable and cozy long enough to develop as much of an understanding about the universe that we have. one that shows us exactly how precarious and crazy our situation is. And hopefully we can sit here staring out into the universe, understanding more and more about how it might kill us. And also I think a pretty good reminder also of how important science is

and how important it is to understand these things because if we can have some warning about something that's coming our way, it would be good to know, right? So we can protect things and shield ourselves and turn off our phones just in time. That's right. More than just understanding why we are dying, it might actually prevent it.

So that we can rest easy. And keep checking Twitter. That's right. At the beach, reading papers and getting a nice tan. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you.

When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Complex problem solving. Takes effort.

Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect.

Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.