CME's, active regions and high energy flares

You don't need to 'trust' anything but your own two eyes RC.
It is your eyes that I do not trust: Why should we trust the interpretations of solar images by a person who has made so many mistakes in interpreting them?

You don't see that dark filament forming in the southern hemisphere prior to the eruption in the southern hemisphere? You don't see it "lift away" and then all hell break loose?
That is dumb - it is obvious what is happening. Looks like a flare to me ("all hell break loose"). I see no filament eruption.
 
Try looking at the frames for 11:12 - 11:48. The filament comes off the surface around 11:12, it's pretty well airborne at 11:24, and it's in full eruption mode 24 minutes later. Stop the frames if you need to and pay attention to the dark filament rising from the surface.
 
http://lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil/daily_mpg/2000_09/000912_eit_195.mpg
You really don't see that dark filament in the southern hemisphere "erupt/disappear/go flying off the sun" just before the bright flaring occurs? Either your the least observant person I've ever met, or you're playing coy with me. :)
You really see that dark filament in the southern hemisphere "erupt/disappear/go flying off the sun" just before the bright flaring occurs? I am at least as observant as you, or you're just cannot understand what I write :).

Now cite the textbook that told you how to visually see the difference between a filament eruption and a flare.

One more time: It looks like a flare to me.
 
Try looking at the frames for 11:12 - 11:48. The filament comes off the surface around 11:12, it's pretty well airborne at 11:24, and it's in full eruption mode 24 minutes later. Stop the frames if you need to and pay attention to the dark filament rising from the surface.
One more time: I saw it. It looks like a flare to me. No filament eruption happens.
 
I'm just trying to figure out how stupid you're going to look by the time I've pointed out about a hundred or so of these events.


You look at a picture that shows some existing activity and you "predict" that activity will continue existing where that activity exists. And you are going to do that a hundred times. And I'm going to look stupid?

Dude, you can't change physics just because you don't like it. The filament eruptions are the *SOURCE* of the *MASS* that we observe in "coronal mass ejections". You can't change scientific fact. Sooner or later you'll have to simply accept it, but knowing you that's going to take awhile.


Of course that didn't address the issue of your qualifications to understand the concept of cause and effect in any way. Your arguments still seem to be based on ignorance. My offer to help you understand, to help you improve your scientific qualifications still stands.

What *IS* it with you and the liar, liar, pants on fire gig? Is that grade school nonsense all you know?


You claimed to have a method, scientific, quantitative, and objective for "predicting" CMEs. After having been asked literally dozens of times to describe your method you continue to refuse to do that. You must understand that after all these requests for you to describe your method, all these opportunities for you to describe it, and all these times of you refusing to do that, your claim sounds like a lie. So the question was, would Birkeland have behaved that way?

If Birkeland claimed to have a scientific objective method for doing something and he was asked to describe that method, would he have called the people who asked liars? If Birkeland didn't really have a method for doing something, and people asked him to describe his method, would he have lied and continued to claim he had a method?

If you knew anything about solar physics, flares and CME's you'd have offered us some information by now. All you've done however is hang out in denialville. Sooner or later you'll have to accept fact. The fact is that the *MASS* in that filament is the MASS that erupts and it's the MASS that is ejected from the corona. We can even track it's path. Deal with it.


I learned in fifth grade science class that the burden of proof rests upon the person making the claim. Your continued badgering of other people to support your claim shows that your arguments neglect or ignore that simple, grade school concept. As to your scientific qualifications, did you learn that burden of proof thing in grade school, too?
 
One more time: I saw it. It looks like a flare to me. No filament eruption happens.

On the other hand it looks a bit like this TRACE movie
This QT movie (4MB) (courtesy Dawn Myers, GSFC) shows the filament eruption that was part of the M2.5-class flare observed by TRACE in its 171Å channel on 6 July 2006. The movie (8-10UT, at 80s cadence) shows the initial activation of the filament. As it begins to erupt, flare ribbons show up in the NE and SW at 08:22 UT. We believe these ribbons to be caused by the interaction of the overlying field with the erupting filament field. As the overlying field is forced out of the way, the footprint of that evolving field is outlined by the rapid expansion of the ribbons into irregularly shaped rings. The transition region emission from below hot loops within these rings fades away, leaving dark patches of, presumably stretched or opened magnetic fields. The image to the left summarizes this in a difference between images taken at 08:16 and 09:02UT: the brightened post-flare loops lie between two dark (dimmed) patches outlined by the residual flare ribbons.The associated CME in progress is shown in the LASCO C3 image above.
So the other movie may be a filament eruption and there is no flare.

Or there may be a filament eruption and a flare - but how do we separate the two?
 
One more time: I saw it. It looks like a flare to me. No filament eruption happens.

Well, you're right about the flaring process that occurs *AFTER* the filament eruptions,, but you're dead wrong about the filament eruption. In all fairness, it's not entirely your fault.

One of the primary advantages of SDO, besides it's improved resolution, is the improvement in image cadence. In that SOHO movie the images are taken about 12 minutes apart, and the eruption process is relatively fast. Due to the slower cadence of SOHO, there are only about 4 frames in the SOHO image where you can actually see the filament lift up from the surface, to the moment it has fully "erupted". It is harder to spot in SOHO as a result.

Lots of erupting filaments generate EM flaring in a line along the erupting filament. One of the eruptions last week did a very similar thing. When the material erupts, most of the mass erupts outward *AND* a little of that mass erupts back toward the sun. We see the affect of the mass eruption in the corona as well as in LASCO.

There is an EM flare after the filament eruption, but there was definitely a filament eruption that predated the "all hell breaking loose" part. :)


http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_1024_0304.mpg
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c3.mpg

This morning (while I sleeping) the mass "pitcher" tossed the mass pitch toward the 10:00 position and the catcher caught it at that same position on the clock

Every filament eruption of any magnitude is going to results in a mass flow movement that is later recorded in LASCO. There is a direct cause/effect connection in terms of the mass itself.
 
Last edited:
You really see that dark filament in the southern hemisphere "erupt/disappear/go flying off the sun" just before the bright flaring occurs?

Yes, I absolutely see that filament lift off from the surface and erupt prior to the arcade flaring process.

I am at least as observant as you, or you're just cannot understand what I write :).

Oh, I understand what you write. I also understand what I'm looking for, and I understand how the cadence on SOHO affects my ability to "see" the filament eruption. I already pointed out the timeline of the four frames in question. As I said, the cadence of SOHO images makes it more challenging to "spot" the filament eruption, but it certainly happened, and it happened directly before the arcade flare.

Now cite the textbook that told you how to visually see the difference between a filament eruption and a flare.

Textbook? Sorry RC, my methods are self taught, and your beloved industry isn't even aware of the fact that they are the same processes. A flare is simply a direction (smaller) mass flow than a CME. All the mass flows originate from two basic processes in the solar atmosphere, filament eruption, and EM flaring.

One more time: It looks like a flare to me.

If by "flare" you mean there is an arcade "current sheet" following the filament eruption, your right, there is such a thing that happens after MANY filament eruptions, including the one from last week. I guess I'll have to go dig up the SDO images from last week to show you what I mean. It's very common for the erupting filament to blow some material back toward the sun, and that material results in arcade flare patterns alone the erupting filament.
 
One more time: I saw it. It looks like a flare to me. No filament eruption happens.

I honestly can't see how you missed it. Look closely at the area under the arcade flare prior to the flare. You'll see a "dark filament" located right there before the flare. It "flies off" a few frames before the arcade flare occurs. That is because the filament "erupted" between 11:12 and 11:48.
 
On the other hand it looks a bit like this TRACE movie

So the other movie may be a filament eruption and there is no flare.

Or there may be a filament eruption and a flare - but how do we separate the two?

Nice movie by the way. Great reference. The filament is "dark" prior to the eruption. As the filament erupts, and lifts from the surface the "current flow" rearranges itself, an arcade flare occurs, and the material in the filament flies off at about the 4:00 position.
 
This CME appeared after a solar filament collapsed and dropped relatively cool, dense gas onto the surface of the Sun," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "You don't need sunspots to have filaments, so these types of explosions can occur even when the sunspot number is low."

Emphasis mine. The filament in question didn't actually "collapse" by the way, it "erupted". The eruption process spewed *MOST* of the matter inside the thread into space, but as David notes, *SOME* relatively cool plasma is blown back toward the surface and that material does in fact "light up" in the arcade flare that follows.

The word "collapse" is unfortunate IMO because the filament doesn't "collapse" at all, it erupts. Most of the matter in the erupting filament blew out and away from the sun. but a tiny fraction off matter blew back, and returned to the surface. Some filaments do in fact "collapse" or erupt *INTO* the surface rather than away from the sun, but that particular filament erupted outward and a tiny bit erupted toward the sun.
 
Mozina's *PREDICTIONS* will provide a path for his first *NOBEL* prize. How could others on this thread be so "focused" on *METHODS,* "definitions," *MATH BUNNIES* and "evidence"? He is *DESTINED* to become the *SOLAR SAGE* of this century! You will some day tell your *GRANDCHILDREN* that you knew him.:clap:
Perhaps he will become the Father of Mathless Physics and we will all be so, so, sorry. Future science students won't be required to bark math on command.
 
Perhaps he will become the Father of Mathless Physics and we will all be so, so, sorry. Future science students won't be required to bark math on command.

:) Cute.

Of course there's nothing wrong with math, and math can be very useful in some applications. Math alone however is certainly no substitute for pure empirical physics, experimentation with real, tangible control mechanisms, and OBSERVATION.

Solar flare prediction is more about conceptual understanding and careful observation and less about math than you realize. That's not a problem for me personally, but I can see why that's a problem for some, particularly astronomers as a whole. They have a professional and emotional need to quantify everything.

The "signs" of impending eruptions/ejections are more easily "observed" than quantified, although they certainly can be quantified as long as one is willing to look for "dark" and "light" areas on the surface of the sun. There's no way however to begin to quantify anything useful until one UNDERSTANDS the physical cause/effect relationships that allow us to "observe" flares/CME's in progress.

My purpose in this thread was to discuss the cause/effect relationships that may one day lead to very precise mathematical models of flare prediction. That however will *NEVER* happen unless and until we are all clear and we all understand the cause/effect relationships we are looking for, and we agree upon a method of looking for them that allows us to properly model them mathematically.

It's pointless at the moment to fixate upon the actual motive force behind all the flares and CME's, but we should at least be able to agree upon observational cause/effect relationships in solar imagery. That *COULD* lead to some useful mathematical models, unlike those "magnetic reconnection" papers that will *NEVER* lead to anything even *REMOTELY* like accurate solar flare prediction.
 
Er no. We can clearly see that filament "erupt" at about the 1:30 position. That is an event that may have nothing to do with the "pitch".

I missed this earlier. The motive force behind the "pitch" (of mass) is the EM field. That's the only field in nature that could emit charged particles at a significant portion of the speed of light. We aren't discussing the motive force of the pitcher any further than that in this thread. All I'm noting is that the pitcher threw the pitch (of mass) and that mass is "caught" by LASCO.

The pitcher uses the EM field to "pitch" but the "pitch" (of mass) is clearly visible as an erupting dark filament in SDO, and the catch is clearly seen in LASCO in the same vectored direction as the filament. There's nothing left to chance there RC. There's a direct cause/effect relationship involved. That "dark pitch" in SDO becomes a "light catch" in LASCO.
 
Hey, I saw a *FILAMENT*. When I pulled on it, my sweater *UNRAVELLED*. Now, I too can **PREDICT**. I'm on my way to Oslo.
 
Last edited:
Well, you're right about the flaring process that occurs *AFTER* the filament eruptions,, but you're dead wrong about the filament eruption. In all fairness, it's not entirely your fault.
You have presented n evidence for a eruption eruption. It is so far a figment of your imagination. This is not my fault - it is yours for having an overactive imagination.
Why should we trust the interpretations of solar images by a person who has made so many mistakes in interpreting them?
 
Yes, I absolutely see that filament lift off from the surface and erupt prior to the arcade flaring process.
Yes, I absolutely see that filament lift off from the photospahere prior to the arcade flaring process.
I see no filament eruption.

Textbook? Sorry RC, my methods are self taught
In other words we are back to "I see bunnies in the clouds" logic.

Why should we trust the interpretations of solar images by a person who has made so many mistakes in interpreting them?
Why should we trust the "self taught" methods of a person who has shown himself to be ignorant of basic physics, e.g. it took you a week or so to quote the standard definition of pressure despite bing given links to sources.

If by "flare" you mean there is an arcade "current sheet" following the filament eruption,
You are wrong and have presented no evidence of
  • whatever you imagine a arcade "current sheet" is.
  • that there was a filament eruption
It's very common for the erupting filament to blow some material back toward the sun, and that material results in arcade flare patterns alone the erupting filament.
Wrong. The energy of a filament eruption could heat the plsama. That would blow the material away from the Sun.
When filaments erupt:
  • the magnetic files supporting the filament vanish
  • most (if not all) of the filament material falls back into the photosphere.
  • the rest of the material is available for events that need not be causially related to the eruptions to pick up, e.g. flares and CME.
 
Um, if you saw the filament "lift off", you saw the filament eruption. :)
Um - wrong as usual :).
  1. I saw the filament "lift off".
  2. I would be dumb to trust your word that a filament eruption is happening because you have been wrong many times before:
    Why should we trust the interpretations of solar images by a person who has made so many mistakes in interpreting them?
  3. Thus it is either
    1. A flare.
    2. A CME
    3. Or maybe even a filament eruption.
Your declared state of ignorance about how astronomers tell the difference makes any comment you make about solar images, a flight of fantasy.
Originally Posted by Michael Mozina
Textbook? Sorry RC, my methods are self taught
 

Back
Top Bottom