Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is there weather in space?

Episode Date: November 7, 2019

Is space weather something that exists? Can it affect us here on earth. Find out the answer to this and many other questions with Daniel and Jorge. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton, Elaine Welteroth. Learn how to get comfortable. pivotal pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots, now on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, doesn't it feel like every day there's something new to worry about? What do you mean? Like what? Well, you know that we got forest fires in California's, we got super hurricanes, we got super hurricanes, We've got crazy political situations.

We have financial uncertainty. We have that whole question about whether Spider-Man's going to be part of the Marvel universe. I mean, that one's got me worried. I know. These things could rock our world. Well, unfortunately, I've got a new thing for you to worry about. I feel like every podcast is a new one, Daniel, that I need to worry about. But what do you mean this time?

Are you talking about aliens coming from space to eat us? Oh, no, that's something I would look forward to. No, no. This is... Getting eaten by aliens. The arrival of aliens, you know, I would gladly offer up civilization. Our civilization is a meal for aliens if they give us some secrets of the universe. Let's not elect Daniel to office.

He's not running. In 2020. Well, no, it turns out that we need to worry about the weather, but not just the weather here on Earth, the weather in space. Hey, I'm back. This is Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whitein. I'm a particle physicist and I'm pleased to be the co-host of this podcast. And welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard Radio. In which we talk about everything that's amazing and crazy and wonderful and scary and reassuring about our bonkers universe and try to give you understanding that really settles to the bottom of your brain.

So yeah, I'm back. Thanks for holding down the fort, Daniel. I was gone for a couple of weeks there. Well, thank you very much for coming back. I think listeners of the podcast are relieved to have you back. They have more laughs and less physics. More cartoonist per podcast. I mean, that's pretty good value right there.

That's right. And, you know, frankly, I was getting tired of deflecting everybody's questions about where you were. Another mystery of the universe you had to keep explaining. I know I love answering emails. I love answering questions. but some of these questions, I didn't know how to answer. People were asking me if I had kidnapped you and traded you to aliens for some enormous pile of bananas.

Which did happen once, but not this time. That's right. No, people were pretty curious. Yeah, I hope nobody was really concerned. Basically, I just had to go take a nap, basically, is what happened. Maybe people weren't aware that cartoonists have a different life cycle. They hibernate. So, you know, they fill up all summer.

and then sleep for six weeks in the winter. Yeah. Every six years, we have to take a two-month nap. That's right. And so, folks, he's coming back to you extra refreshed, extra funny, extra hilarious. And for those of you who are worried that I had done something to Jorge that I kidnapped him, I hope you hear the relief in my voice at his return. Yeah, no, actually what happened was Daniel and I have several big projects going on,

and one of them just kind of needed a little bit of extra attention. So I had to step away from the mic a little bit. But it sounds like you guys had a lot of fun while I was gone. You had a lot of fun guests, and Crystal Dilworth came in and covered for me. Yeah, Crystal is our guest host, and we had some fun conversations about the cosmic microwave background and other stuff. And my friend Matt came by the podcast, and then I had a few on my own. And let me tell you, it was challenging, having a conversation with myself. But yeah, I'm back, and I'm back for the foreseeable future, at least until Daniel kidnaps me again.

Until the intergalactic banana space pirates come and offer to trade you for secrets of the universe. So today we're going to be talking about, it seems like yet another thing we should be worried about coming from space to harm us or affect us. That's right. Most of the time we can live in this little bubble we call Earth and not worry too much about what's going on out there in the universe. I mean, we know because we've listened to the podcast, that there are crazy things happening in the center of galaxies and an enormous violent things happening in the center. of stars, but we don't often think about that because we can just ignore everything that happens above the atmosphere and just sort of go about our everyday life. It seems like that there are always other things happening in the universe, right? Like we don't just live in a bubble.

We live in a solar system with stuff flying around and with other celestial things out there, making noise and throwing things. That's right. We do live in a bubble. It's a magnetic bubble. The Earth's magnetic field protects us from most of the stuff that's happening out there, but it's not perfect. And sometimes this incredible force field actually does get penetrated by crazy things happening out there in space

and we have to pay attention. And so to the end of the podcast, we'll be talking about, what is space weather? Is it usually sunny? Does it rain out in space? What exactly does that mean, Daniel? Yeah, I think it's a fascinating topic.

You know, what is space weather? What does it mean? How does it affect us? What precautions can be? we take? Can we predict it? You know, can you go on an app and figure out what's going to be happening in space in the next week or two? And I think it helps just connect you to the larger context. You know, weather events here on Earth help you understand what's happening nearby. Like, oh, it's not raining here, but it is raining over there. It gives you a sort of a sense

of the larger context. And space weather is sort of a generalization of that. It gives us a sense for what's happening in the solar system, what's going on? What does it like to be on Venus today? Right. And, you know, whether our local station can come up with a pretty cool sounding name for technology to predict it, like Doppler Space Radar 3,000. That's right. Pretty soon we're going to have a arms race between local weather stations to have fancier sounding technologies. Let's see. Quantum Doppler, Pulsar, gamma, 3,000 million Doppler vision. Was that just all the tech words you can think of? And that's it. There was a mind dump right there.

That's it. That's all that's in my head at this moment. Well, let's see if Jorge can do better than the average person on the street at UC Irvine. So I walked around and I wondered, do people even know that space weather is a thing? What do they think it is? And I asked people at UC Irvine, is there weather out in space? What does that even mean? So think about it for a second. If someone approached you and asked you, if there is weather in space, what would you answer?

Here's what people had to say. Is there weather in space? I mean, just because the question exists, I'm assuming so. I haven't heard anything about it. What would that be like? What does that mean weather in space? I would guess just like shifts in like antimatter and how much is like concentrated in certain spaces

which could affect, I don't know, movement of comments, literally anything. I just assume weather as in storms or rain and wind things at that level. No, I don't think there is. No? That's a good question. I'm not sure about space,

but I know that there's weather and patterns on specific planets, but I don't know about the overall atmosphere. I have no clue. I'd say yes, because it's so big. There has to be some somewhere. I think so. Yes, solar winds.

Solar winds. Okay, what are solar winds? Huge pulses of electromagnetic radiation from a sun or a star. Okay, so it's radiation, not particles? Um, yeah, for the most part, radiation. Does that affect us here on Earth? Not really, because we have the magnetic field of Earth shielding us from that.

I feel like there is a chance that there's like water and stuff up there, so that means that there is weather. I've heard of the idea of it, but I don't know personally. I have heard of space weather. I know you have solar winds, large coronal ejections, and bombarding the whole solar system all the time and hits the earth and the magnetic field from the earth deflects it to the poles and this is when you see the northern lights can also affect our communications on earth our satellites so what do you think of these answers Jorge well it seems that it seems pretty common sense a lot of people assume there would be weather in other planets but maybe people seem skeptical that there would be weather in like actual space

in the space between planets. So that's pretty reasonable, right? Yeah, that is pretty reasonable. Yeah, like I've seen movies where there are storms and Mars and, you know, I imagine you look at a picture of Jupiter, there's swirling clouds. So, you know, the idea that there's weather out there is not weird to me, but to other people it seems.

But the idea that there might be weather like in the vacuum of space, that's a little bit more hard to understand. Yeah, and the topic of weather on other plants. planets is really fascinating because, of course, we'd like to understand, are those planets livable? Could we ever move there? And can we watch the clouds on other planets and use that to understand what's in the atmosphere? Is there water there? That's a whole other fascinating topic that we're going to dig into in a future podcast. But you're right. Today we're talking about the sort of weather between planets. And some people said, you know, well, there's no water

up there. So in space. So how could it be weather? So I think you're right, people. So today I'm hoping we're going to expand people's sense for what weather means. It's not just rain and sun. I like the person who said, I have no clue, but I'm going to say yes, just because space is so big. I like that answer because it could apply to anything. Like, do you think there are purple elephants in space? Well, it's pretty big, so yeah. Yeah, why not? Yeah. My brain says no, but hey, space is big. So yes. And that's a pretty safe answer, right? Isn't it? Yeah, it is because if space is infinite, then everything that can exist will exist. and there probably are purple elephants out there.

There's probably a planet where it rains purple elephants. Oh, boy, you need a bigger umbrella for that. That's right. Well, one time on the podcast, we were speculating about whether it rains diamonds somewhere. We were laughing about that as an absurdity. And then somebody wrote in and said, actually, it rains diamonds here in our solar system. What? Yeah, I think it's on Uranus.

Well, that's cool. I think you would need, like, an umbrella to invert it to catch all the diamonds. I don't think diamonds are worth that much if it's raining diamonds. I think on Uranus, you've got to use a different kind of engagement ring. Maybe water crystals, right? Like an ice cube. It's a whole different market there. That's right.

De Beers has not managed to corner that market. Right. So let's get into it, Daniel. So there's apparently a thing called space weather is when I'm hearing from you. And that means there's weather in space. And it might actually affect us on a daily basis. It might even cause you to lose cell phone signal, which is like, wow, fatal. Everybody's suddenly alert what?

Oh, huh? This is actually relevant to me. Are you talking about? Yeah, in fact, right now there might be a... You're totally gaslighting our listeners there. Weather event that might cause this podcast to skip a beep. No, it's true because space is not empty. We talk about this a lot, and it's not empty on several levels, of course.

Any arbitrary piece of vacuum is actually filled with fluctuating quantum fields, which is amazing. But space itself is even filled with particles and all sorts of energy. Of course, it's very not dense. It's very sparse compared to the atmosphere around our planet. But there is stuff out there. And specifically, it's dominated by stuff that comes from the sun. And so there's two major things we think about when we think about space weather. And that's the solar wind and the solar radiation.

Because I think you were telling me earlier that, you know, for us, space is at least what we call space around the Earth. is pretty much dominated by the sun. Like, you know, we're just a small spec compared to the sun, which is this giant explosion. And so pretty much, when you say space weather, you really mean sort of like sun weather. That's right, because the sun doesn't just pour out photons for us and for you to get a nice tan. It spews out a huge amount of stuff. It spews out particles like protons and electrons at very high speed. And this is what we call the solar wind.

And, you know, it's not a great name for it because it's really like a solar particle flux or something. But they call it the solar wind. Like a solar jet maybe. Yeah, yeah, solar eruption or solar farts or something. I'm not sure what. Solar farts. Yes, that is a new scientific term. Well, it might be appropriate because it comes from the digestion of those gases in the sun, right? So, hey, and maybe it's just because I'm married to a biologist who studies, you know, digestion and stuff that had this stuff on my brain. I would have gone with solar burps. Either way, the sun puts out a lot of particles, like actual mass, right?

Not just radiation. There's lots of radiation as well, but there's also solar particles. And these particles fly through the solar system, and they call it the solar wind. And it's important. It's a big factor in how you can survive out there in space, and also sometimes it penetrates down to the earth. Now, is it sort of like clouds? Like, does it form clouds out there? Like, can you imagine, like, swirling clouds?

or a mist of these particles kind of swirling around us, or is it pretty much just like a jet going through us? They're moving really fast, so they just basically fly away from the sun in straight lines. So if you want to visualize it, just imagine like the sun has a billion guns and each one is shooting protons and electrons out in every direction. Wow.

But we have like kind of a force field, right? Like you're saying that our magnetic field kind of deflect some of these particles. That's right. We have a multi-layer force field. First of all, we have our atmosphere, that's sort of the closest thing. And any particle that makes it to the atmosphere

is going to bang into all the other particles, right? So that protects you at some level. But even before it gets to the atmosphere, it has to penetrate our magnetic field. And remember, charged particles, protons and electrons have a charge will bend when they hit a magnetic field. So because we have a magnetic field, most of this stuff bends around the Earth

rather than even hitting our atmosphere. So we are very grateful to our magnetic field. If we didn't have one, like Mars has very, very small one, then this solar wind would basically blow our atmosphere away. All right. So when you say space weather, you mean solar flares and solar winds. That's right. So the key thing is there's stuff out there in space.

The sun is pumping out radiation and particles. And the reason we call it weather is because it's not fixed. It's not like it's the same every day. It varies. And so just like the weather, which is the product of very complex systems interacting and hard to predict, the stuff put out by the sun is also variable and hard to predict and has a big impact on us.

And that's what we call it space weather. It's not just because I think it's unpredictable. It's also sort of the result of weather in the sun, right? Like you can almost think of these solar flares and these solar winds is coming from whatever is happening in the surface of the sun, that's sort of like sun weather, right? Yeah, or sun moods, right? We don't understand the sun.

The sun is a huge mystery. Like the most important thing in our solar system, we don't understand how it works. And it's a huge ball of plasma. And because it's plasma, it's ionized particles. It's charged particles. And charged particles, remember, when they move, they generate magnetic fields. And so the sun has this enormous magnetic field that comes from this boiling pot of plasma

that it has encapsulated by this gravitational trap. And it generates this magnetic field. But that magnetic field is also not static because it comes from this constantly writhing, hot boiling mass. So it's like churning all the time. And sometimes it burps. That's kind of what a solar flare is. Yeah. Imagine like a really thick pot of tomato soup like your Italian grandmother might make.

You know, it's slowly bubbling. I'm an Italian grandmother. I should tell my parents. Everybody's Italian grandmother, you know. Or the stereotypical Italian grandmother in, you know, TV shows. That's as close as I come to having an Italian grandmother. Anyway, the bubbling tomato soup eventually forms one of these bubbles and it pops and it sprays tomato soup everywhere. So you can sort of imagine the sun is the same way.

And sometimes it has this bright burst of really hot, bright light. And sometimes it actually shoots out like bits of the sun into space. Really? Like the plasma inside, like the hydrogen and the whatever it's made out of. Yeah. So the plasma is mostly protons and electrons. And sometimes something happens called a coronal mass ejection. And it vomits out like a billion kilograms of plasma.

And it just spews it out into space at like fast. thousands of kilometers per second. Oh, well, you said solar vomit. Is it also a scientific term? I feel like the sun has a lot of stomach problems here. It's burping, it's vomiting, it's farting. Some people like to try to understand it in analogy to weather on Earth. I think it's maybe a better analogy to call it, you know, digestion.

Like the sun is digesting all of this hydrogen and it doesn't always go smoothly. Maybe the sun should try a gluten-free diet, I hear that. The sun has celiac disease. Is that what you're saying? Maybe you should try hydrogen-free dyes, because I think that's the problem. That might be trouble, though. You don't have any energy, right? Yeah, exactly.

But this is not something rare. This happens on the sun, these coronal mass injections, they happen either once a week or like up to four times a day, depending on the solar cycle. The sun has a cycle that lasts about every 11 years. It flips its magnetic field, and it gets really active, and then it goes quieter again. And I think a lot of people have probably seen these in photographs, If you see a photograph of the sun, don't look at the sun directly, we'll be able to see them. But if you see photographs with special lenses of the sun, you'll see like this big, fiery ball.

But then you'll see like these loops that come off of the sun and then come back around that are kind of like a cowlake on your hair. Yeah, or like a big bubble of hot tomato sauce. Maybe I shouldn't do these podcasts just before lunch. I think a lot of people have seen these, right? That's what a solar flare is. It burps out stuff, but then it comes back around and so it forms little loops. Yeah, and there's really two different things. There's the solar flare.

A solar flare is just increased in brightness, like more photons, like a bright flash of light. And a coronal mass injection, that's when it actually spews out material. That's when it spews out this plasma into space, and you get those loops of stuff. Oh, I see. All right. But they're both sort of the same. They're both the same burp. Well, we don't really understand is the amazing thing.

I mean, the sun is the most important thing in our cosmic neighborhood, but it's something we still do not understand. As I was saying before, there's these magnetic fields and people think that sometimes these magnetic fields get twisted and it's like tension in them and then they can like slide back into place and release that tension. And that might be what causes the solar flares. It might be what causes these coronal mass injections, but we don't actually know. And we've noticed that sometimes you get these coronal mass injections more often when you have solar flares, but not all the time. So it's a big mystery. It's a current topic of research. Okay. So they're not necessarily tied together.

You know, sometimes the sun can just, might just spew out extra energy for no reason at all. And sometimes you might get these crazy giant loops. Yeah, and sometimes you can get these solar flares without coronal mass injections. And these flares, they're huge, like these sunspots, these spots on the sun that are brighter or darker.

They're like, you know, 300 times the size of the Earth. These are enormous features. It's hard to wrap your mind around how big the sun is. And so, of course, when it fluctuates, it can really affect life here on Earth. All right. So the sun sometimes has these burps or vomits or farts and that can cause flares or sunspots or coronal mass ejections, which sort of sound like a heart attack. I don't

recommend them. But basically it throws out stuff into space and that's what we call space weather and that space weather can affect us here on Earth in pretty dramatic ways. Absolutely. It's a big factor in our life and it can it can even kill you so let's get into how space weather affects us but first let's take a quick break i had this like overwhelming sensation that i had to call it right then and i just hit call said you know hey i'm jacob shick i'm the CEO of one tribe foundation and i just want to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling and there is help out there the good stuff podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

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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. All right, we're talking about space weather and how it impacts us.

So, Daniel, how does space weather affect us? Does it mean that you have to take out an umbrella? Would UV protection every once in a while? What does that mean? Well, it depends a little bit on how you live your life. But one of my favorite stories about space weather is sort of how the phrase was coined. It was like 150 years ago, 1859, it was an enormous coronal mass ejection, like the biggest one ever in recorded history. And it sent so much energy in terms of particles raining down here on Earth that they created sparks from the telegraph network.

And so people who were using the telegraph network at the time got zapped. And there were sparks flying everywhere and actually started a bunch of forest fires. So did they notice this coronal mass ejection? Like did they see a giant loop in the sun? Yeah, they were studying the sun and they saw this. And at the same time, they observed all this stuff happening here on Earth. And that was the first time they realized to hold on a second, maybe something that happens on the sun, it can actually affect us down here.

And until then they thought, oh, we can study the sun. And it's interesting, obviously it puts out light for us to get, for us to enjoy and to feed our plants and everything. But they hadn't really connected observable stuff on the sun with phenomena here on Earth until then. That's when they knew like, hey, if the sun burps, watch out. That's right. Everybody duck under the table if you hear the sun's stomach start to rumble. Plug your nose of those sun burps. That's the most direct connection.

Like the sun is shooting out protons and electrons. And sometimes those protons can get pushed out really fast by one of these coronal mass injections. then accelerated by the sun's magnetic field, and then they can be strong enough to get through our magnetic field and come down here to Earth. Wow. And so what was happening at that time? Like the particles came in and somehow they, how did they make sparks in the telegraph network? Like, did they somehow supercharged the cables or something?

What was going on? Well, there's two things that can happen there. One is you just get an enormous amount of energy dumped into the atmosphere, and that ionizes atoms, as you have free electrons just running around. And the other thing is that it can create strong magnetic fields for the same reason. And that can create electric pulses. And so if you have wires out there and lots of highly energized electrons, you're basically creating lightning and then you're connected to these wires.

And so you're looking to get zapped. So it just sort of like showers us with energy, which creates, which just kind of amps everything up and that energy has to go somewhere. Absolutely. And so back then, the thing we were most sensitive to was a telegraph network. But these days, we have an enormous communications network that's very sensitive to this kind of pulses. You can affect the magnetic field here on Earth. You can affect anything that essentially bounces signals around the atmosphere, and anything that has electronics can get zapped.

So like my cell phone, I mean, it has circuits in it, but if it gets showered by particles, all the electrons going through those circuits can somehow sort of, what, get, you know, frozen? It could get fried because your cell phone is not built to handle high pulses of electricity. It's assuming that the battery in the cell phone is not going to try to kill the cell phone. And so if some strong magnetic field comes and whips up basically a mini electric storm in your cell phone, then yeah, it can fry your cell phone. And it's not just enhanced electromagnetic fields, it's actual particles, too. Remember that we talked about how radiation can damage things? It's like a billion tiny bullets. Each one can damage your DNA,

but they can also damage electronics, which have become super miniaturized. Most electronic systems are sensitive to radiation, but very few are actually protected against it. Of course, it's not as strong near the surface as it is near the top of the atmosphere, because our atmosphere helps diffuse it a little bit. But we have, for example, satellite technology

that's up there in space, and if there's bad solar weather, it can destroy a huge amount of satellite technology. I think a billion dollars worth of damage is done every year by solar storms. A billion dollars. A billion dollars. So there's big money in predicting solar weather. Like if you know a solar storm is coming, you can shut down your satellite or, you know, close it up in some way to protect it or move it out of the way even.

There's a huge amount of money in predicting solar weather. Wow. So you could spend a lot of many putting up satellites up there, but they might get fried. they will get fried yeah and of course it's not just satellites that will get fried if you have people up there and a solar storm comes that means a huge dose of radiation we can be talking about 10 or a hundred times as much radiation as an astronaut will usually get and you know out there in space you're already accumulating more radiation than you do do here on earth because you're not protected by the atmosphere and the magnetic field and so it can be a fatal pulse and it goes through like the walls of the space station too yeah it takes a lot of the lot of energy to protect yourself from this radiation because it has a lot of energy. The only way to stop it is to have enough material between you and it that they can absorb that energy. So they have special places, for example, on the international space station that have heavy shielding. They can't shield the entire thing or the whole thing would be too

heavy to be up in space, but they have like a safe room, basically. And if they can tell the astronauts fast enough that this dose is coming, they all scramble to the safe room to protect themselves. Kind of like a tornado, what do you call it, tornado basement or tornado safe zones? That's right, but I don't think the space station has a basement. Yeah, it does, it's just upstairs. It's the adage, yeah. It's the metaphorical tornado basement on the space station.

I love that. That's hilarious. I like that the idea of a space tornadoes. Is that a thing? Can we make it a thing? I think we should write that science fiction novel. Yep, absolutely. Don't tell everyone, but that's the project you were talking about.

You said you had to go away for six weeks, right? That's right. I was working on space tornadoes, yeah. That's for our next movie, Space Twister. That's right. And then the sequel, Space Tornado with Sharks, right? Yeah, Space Tarknato. Or Galacta.

Maybe Galactic's Tarknado, just to up it up. Yeah, but the aliens are sharks somehow, and they travel here in a wormhole that's kind of like a tornado. Hey, you know what? This started as a joke, but I think it's actually a pretty good idea. Hey, we have a new project, guys. But, you know, space weather isn't all bad. If you get these particles coming into the atmosphere, they don't all just penetrate the atmosphere. Some of them still do spiral around the magnetic field and end up in the North Pole.

And then you get extra solar, and then you get extra northern lights, this Aurora Borealis, these glow in the atmosphere of green and blue and crazy dancing lights. Those are very spectacular in a solar storm. So space weather can be pretty. I mean, it might be killing some astronauts out there, but hey, you might get a better picture. Yeah, that's right. You know, on this podcast, we try to look at the bright side of the universe. Even fatal doses of radiation can look pretty in some context. But, you know, just like you shouldn't be shooting hurricanes, please also don't shoot the northern lights.

So it sounds like it affects electronics out there in space and astronauts in space. Maybe you were saying even people in airplanes might get an extra dose of radiation. But is it something that I have to worry about in an everyday basis? Like, should I check the space weather before I go to the beach? It does matter a lot for airplanes. You're right. And we should talk about that because people aren't probably aware that every time you fly in an airplane, you do get an extra dose of radiation just because you're higher up in the atmosphere. And if you happen to be in the atmosphere when there's one of these solar storms, it can be a serious health issue.

And in addition, it can knock out the communications of your airplane. And this happens sometimes. Yeah, planes rely on navigation technology, which can be useless in a solar storm because it relies on things like bouncing signals off the atmosphere. And when a solar storm comes, it basically makes ripples in the atmosphere. And so these signals don't bounce cleanly. They scatter instead of reflecting. And so there's been times when planes had to fly without these signals. Sometimes these outages are minutes.

Sometimes these things are days long. And so your plane could be out there flying without the necessary navigational technology, thanks to the sun's burp. But the pilot still, you know, he's okay or she's okay. They're still steering the plane, right? Oh, yeah, they just close their eyes and hope, you know. Okay, good. No, planes all have many ways to navigate and lots of backup systems.

But when you lose one, then you're more reliant on the others. But yes, in addition, it can affect you down here on Earth. Can it? They're like, will I get extra sunburn or, you know, feel a little extra plasma-e if I go to the beach that day? How plasma-e do you feel on a normal day? I know. Depends on the day, I guess. Just enough.

That's called Jorge Weather, folks. Yeah, it's not a big thing for you to worry about in terms of radiation. These things don't hit the earth broadly, so you're very unlikely to be right in the middle of one. But it can cause like blackouts. Like in 1989, there was a really powerful geomagnetic storm that set out a huge power blackout in Canada. It left 6 million people without electricity for hours. But wait, why only Canada? Wouldn't it blanket the whole Earth?

No, these things are not necessarily Earth-sized. It's like a jet of particles and just happen to hit Canada. Oh, they're like specific. They're like little laser beams. Now you're making it sound like the sun hit Canada on purpose. Like the sun is anti-Canada. Well, I'm just saying, you know. I haven't been pro-Canada.

I love Canada. So I'm very sensitive to any, you know, defamation of Canadian character. Yeah. Well, we were just accusing the sun of not liking Canadians in 1989. Yeah, I hope it's, you know, it's learned from then. it's moved on. Yeah, and you can actually track this stuff. Like, you don't have to just be ignorant and hope that the space weather is going to be good.

Maybe you are Elon Musk and you're launching a satellite tomorrow and you want to know if the solar flare is coming. There are actually a lot of public resources people probably aren't aware about. All right, well, let's get into how you might predict space weather or even if that's possible. But first, let's take a quick break. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call.

I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice.

There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets.

With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets.

Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman, and my podcast, Grazacus 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 auditioned 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. 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. All right, we talked about

space weather and how that's really mostly sun weather, right? And how it involves solar flares and solar burps and vomits. And that's because we are close to the sun, right? The sun is the biggest thing nearby. If we were in the asteroid bells or something somewhere near Jupiter, then Jupiter has its own weather also. It pumps out a lot of radiation.

So there would be weather from Jupiter also, yeah. Oh, jovial weather. Jovial weather, not always so jovial. Yeah. Not as sunny, but still pretty jovial. Yeah, if you're, for example, living on the surface of Io, then you have to worry about the radiation from your Jovian planet, exactly. Oh, wow, because the weather in Jupiter might be turning out and burping and farting.

Yeah, we know that Jupiter is not static. We can see from here that there are storms on its surface, and inside this crazy stuff happening. And so the amount of radiation that Jupiter is emitting is also varying. Now, over here on Earth, we're mostly affected by the solar. weather. So you're right, space weather on Earth is mostly about the sun because that's the biggest source of weather nearby. And so it might cause blackouts or fry our electronics or satellites. And so the question is, can we predict space weather? Can we like, you know, give the satellites and

the astronauts a little heads up? We're doing everything we can. You know, we love to understand the sun for lots of reasons. One is just practical. Like, we need to know if our satellites are going and get blown out or protect our astronauts. And the other is it's the most important astrophysical thing nearby. And it's a huge mystery. If we understood better how the sun worked, we could understand how other stars work

and how long they're going to last and how they were formed. And there are a pretty big, important feature of this incredible universe we find ourselves in. So it's a fun mystery. But we just don't understand it because we've only been studying it for, you know, 150 years or so.

And it's literally a huge topic. I mean, but couldn't we just, look at the sun and tell if something's coming our way. Because, you know, I imagine we could maybe see the flares before all of the, you know, protons and electrons hit us. Wouldn't we have some kind of warning? Yeah, well, there's two different kind of things you can do. First of all, that's a great idea.

Nobody's ever thought of that before. Actually look at the sign to try to predict it. Really? After this call, I'm going to get on the phone with NASA and let them know your idea. A new project for us. Let's do it. No, there's two things we're trying to do. One is sort of ground up, understand the sun as a theory.

theoretical object? Do we know what's going on inside? And so can we use that to predict what's going to happen on the outside? And then, you know, if we can get that model to work, we can connect it with recent events. And that's the best way to do it because it can give you a deeper insight and help you understand things in the short term and the long term. And then there's the more practical one. There's the sort of, as you suggested, we said, well, we've noticed a connection that there happens to be a coronal mass ejection a few days after a sunspot or 50% of the the times after sunspots, and so you look for these patterns and try to use them to predict what's going to happen.

It's sort of like weather on Earth used to be, like, oh, the sky is green. Does that mean there's going to be a tornado? We're just looking for these patterns to try to see what gives you a clue as to what's going to happen in the next few days. I think the sun turned green, that would be a sign. Something's going on. Yeah, what would you do if the sun turned green, Jorge? Pack your bags and go into the basement?

I would make my tornado space movies quickly. as possible before. Well, you've been building your strategic banana reserve for a reason, and so I guess you'd have to tap into that. And this is an active area of research. In fact, it was just a couple of weeks ago that we launched a whole new satellite

just to study our atmosphere and the impact of solar weather. It's called ICON. And it studies the ionosphere around the Earth, this area of ionized particles that surrounds in the lower atmosphere. Okay, so there are ways that we can sort of predict these things, and there

people looking into it. But it's still pretty on. It's a hot topic. It's hot. But it sounds like we're still sort of at the mercy of the weather. Absolutely. You know, it's hard enough to understand the weather here on Earth. And we're right in the middle of it. We can observe it in so many ways. We can take any measurement we want. We just go outside. Now trying to imagine understanding the weather on something 93 million miles away. You can hardly take measurements. It's much bigger. It's much more complicated. It's totally different from anything you experience, that's a much more difficult problem to solve scientifically. And it's just as complicated because the solar atmosphere and the solar surface is in motion. It's churning, as you said. So this

is not something that's easy to do. And so it's an exciting topic. So those are you interested in helping protect a billion dollar industry every year or protect astronauts' lives or just deeply interested in like how the sun works and can we understand it? There's a, there's going to be a long future of research there. You could be the person who invents the quantum Doppler solar 3 million. Which summons the shark tornado and ends all life on Earth. That's right. Tuning at 10 o'clock.

For Daniel and Jorge, destroy the universe. All right. Well, the next time you go out there and think about the weather, maybe also leave a little room in your brain for thinking about the space weather as well and whether that might affect you when you go out. And whether it's going to be hot or not. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time.

If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio 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,

we're not going to do. 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 iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts get fired up y'all season two of good game with sarah spain is underway we just welcomed one of my favorite people an incomparable soccer icon megan ripino to the show, and we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were like riding the lime bikes the other day, and we're like, we! People ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan

in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. I'm Simone Boyce, host of the Brideside 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.

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