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SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids
 
Solar wind
speed: 383.6 km/sec
density: 8.8 protons/cm3
more data: ACE, DSCOVR
Updated: Today at 2351 UT
X-ray Solar Flares
6-hr max: A9
1743 UT May17
24-hr: A9
1440 UT May17
explanation | more data
Updated: Today at: 2300 UT
Daily Sun: 17 May 19
Sunspot AR2741 poses a continued threat for minor C-class solar flares. Credit: SDO/HMI

Sunspot number: 13
What is the sunspot number?
Updated 17 May 2019

Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 0 days
2019 total: 74 days (54%)
2018 total: 221 days (61%)
2017 total: 104 days (28%)
2016 total: 32 days (9%)
2015 total: 0 days (0%)
2014 total: 1 day (<1%)
2013 total: 0 days (0%)
2012 total: 0 days (0%)
2011 total: 2 days (<1%)
2010 total: 51 days (14%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
2008 total: 268 days (73%)
2007 total: 152 days (42%)
2006 total: 70 days (19%)

Updated 17 May 2019


Thermosphere Climate Index
today: 4.48
x1010 W Cold
Max: 49.4
x1010 W Hot (10/1957)
Min: 2.05
x1010 W Cold (02/2009)
explanation | more data
Updated 17 May 2019

The Radio Sun
10.7 cm flux: 74 sfu
explanation | more data
Updated 17 May 2019

Current Auroral Oval:
Switch to: Europe, USA, New Zealand, Antarctica
Credit: NOAA/Ovation
Planetary K-index
Now: Kp= 0 quiet
24-hr max: Kp= 3
quiet
explanation | more data
Interplanetary Mag. Field
Btotal: 5.4 nT
Bz: 3.9 nT north
more data: ACE, DSCOVR
Updated: Today at 2350 UT
Coronal Holes: 17 May 19


Solar wind flowing from these coronal holes should reach Earth on May 21st.
Credit: SDO/AIA

Noctilucent Clouds The northern season for noctilicent clouds is little more than a month away. The electric-blue clouds circling the north pole should return in mid- to late May. .
Switch view: Europe, USA, Asia, Polar
Updated at: 05-17-2019 14:55:05
SPACE WEATHER
NOAA Forecasts
Updated at: 2019 May 17 2200 UTC
FLARE
0-24 hr
24-48 hr
CLASS M
01 %
01 %
CLASS X
01 %
01 %
Geomagnetic Storms:
Probabilities for significant disturbances in Earth's magnetic field are given for three activity levels: active, minor storm, severe storm
Updated at: 2019 May 17 2200 UTC
Mid-latitudes
0-24 hr
24-48 hr
ACTIVE
10 %
10 %
MINOR
01 %
01 %
SEVERE
01 %
01 %
High latitudes
0-24 hr
24-48 hr
ACTIVE
20 %
15 %
MINOR
20 %
20 %
SEVERE
10 %
15 %
 
Friday, May. 17, 2019
What's up in space
       
 

Special Offer: SAVE 600nok per person. Book a combination aurora borealis chase and scenic day tour during the months of September, October or November 2019 for the special price of 1800 kr. Check Marianne's webpage for details!

 

STILL WAITING FOR THE SOLAR STORM: Better late than never? CMEs expected to arrive on May 15th and 16th have not made themselves felt. Nevertheless, NOAA forecasters believe an impact may still be in the offing. There is a chance of G1-class geomagnetic storms on May 17th when at least one late-arriving CME reaches Earth. If this prediction is wrong ... well ... it's not the worst thing that happened this week. Aurora Alerts: SMS Text.

MERCURY VISITS A STAR CLUSTER: Mercury is approaching the Pleiades for a rare conjunction between the first planet and a star cluster. Don't look, though! It's happening in the noon sky only degrees away from the blinding sun:

Human eyes can't see the conjunction, but the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) can. Coronagraphs onboard SOHO block the glare of the sun to reveal nearby stars and planets. Between now and May 20th, coronagraph images will track fleet Mercury swiftly approaching the daughters of Atlas. Join SOHO for a ringside seat.

Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery

AN "X" IN THE SKY: Last week, Marcella Giulia Pace of Livinallongo Col di Lana, Italy, looked at the bright sun, then turned away, squinting. To her surprise, she saw a luminous X in the sky. Blinking didn't make it go away. "It was a rare Wegener Arc," she says.

In the picture, above, the faint X-shaped Wegener Arc is bisected by a bright parhelic circle. They intersect just above the tip of the tree at a point in the sky directly opposite the sun.

Wegener Arcs are caused by sunbeams passing through pencil-shaped ice crystals in the clouds. For the arc to form, the sunbeam must enter through one face of the crystal, bounce off the inside, then exit through another face tilted 60 degrees with respect to the first. No wonder they're rare.


Above: The formation of the Wegener Arc. [more]

The bright parhelic circle is formed in a different way when sunlight shines through plate-shaped crystals. It is rare, too, but not as rare as the Wegener Arc. All in all, a lucky catch. "It made my day," says Pace.

Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery

SPACE BASEBALLS FOR FATHER'S DAY: Father's Day is less than 4 weeks away. What do you get the dad who has everything? A space baseball, of course. This one flew to the stratosphere onboard an Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloon on Feb. 23, 2019, reaching an altitude of 95,423 feet:

You can have it for $99.95. The students are selling space baseballs to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each ball comes with a greeting card showing the ball in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space.

Not a Yankees fan? No problem. We also offer space baseballs for the Dodgers, Red Sox, Astros, Giants, Cardinals, Cubs, Braves, Royals, Brewers, Phillies, Padres, Angels and more. Just let us know your favorite team and we'll fly it if we don't already have it.

Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education


Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery


Free: Spaceweather.com Newsletter

  All Sky Fireball Network
Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.

On May. 17, 2019, the network reported 10 fireballs.
(10 sporadics)

In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]

  Near Earth Asteroids
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.
On May 17, 2019 there were 1983 potentially hazardous asteroids.
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:
Asteroid
Date(UT)
Miss Distance
Velocity (km/s)
Diameter (m)
2019 JL
2019-May-12
14.3 LD
9.2
21
2018 VX8
2019-May-12
6.2 LD
15.5
118
2019 JO2
2019-May-12
3.7 LD
10.8
26
2019 JM3
2019-May-12
10.8 LD
20.3
36
2019 JR5
2019-May-13
11.1 LD
25
41
2019 JK3
2019-May-13
3.2 LD
10.7
16
2019 JW5
2019-May-13
2.3 LD
11.5
12
2019 JO3
2019-May-14
18.5 LD
10.8
47
2019 JN2
2019-May-15
7.1 LD
6.8
26
2019 JN5
2019-May-16
4.4 LD
13.1
28
2019 JH7
2019-May-16
0.2 LD
9.6
4
2019 JG1
2019-May-17
5.6 LD
8.1
17
2012 KT12
2019-May-17
4.2 LD
4
20
2019 GT1
2019-May-17
6.1 LD
3.9
36
2019 JR1
2019-May-18
16.2 LD
10
44
2019 JB1
2019-May-20
16.8 LD
26
233
2019 JL3
2019-May-20
2.5 LD
8.8
37
2019 JF7
2019-May-24
14.7 LD
10.9
37
2015 KQ18
2019-May-25
10.7 LD
13.1
30
66391
2019-May-25
13.5 LD
21.5
1780
2003 LH
2019-May-28
15.6 LD
7.4
32
2011 HP
2019-May-30
12.3 LD
8.4
135
2019 JX2
2019-Jun-06
13.8 LD
7
44
2014 MF18
2019-Jun-06
8.8 LD
3
22
441987
2019-Jun-24
7.7 LD
12.6
178
2008 KV2
2019-Jun-27
17.8 LD
11.4
195
2016 NN15
2019-Jun-28
9.6 LD
8.4
16
2015 XC352
2019-Jul-01
11.9 LD
4.1
26
2016 OF
2019-Jul-07
12.8 LD
8.5
85
2016 NO56
2019-Jul-07
3.4 LD
12.2
26
2016 NJ33
2019-Jul-12
15 LD
4.5
32
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach.
  Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere

SOMETHING NEW! We have developed a new predictive model of aviation radiation. It's called E-RAD--short for Empirical RADiation model. We are constantly flying radiation sensors onboard airplanes over the US and and around the world, so far collecting more than 22,000 gps-tagged radiation measurements. Using this unique dataset, we can predict the dosage on any flight over the USA with an error no worse than 15%.

E-RAD lets us do something new: Every day we monitor approximately 1400 flights criss-crossing the 10 busiest routes in the continental USA. Typically, this includes more than 80,000 passengers per day. E-RAD calculates the radiation exposure for every single flight.

The Hot Flights Table is a daily summary of these calculations. It shows the 5 charter flights with the highest dose rates; the 5 commercial flights with the highest dose rates; 5 commercial flights with near-average dose rates; and the 5 commercial flights with the lowest dose rates. Passengers typically experience dose rates that are 20 to 70 times higher than natural radiation at sea level.

To measure radiation on airplanes, we use the same sensors we fly to the stratosphere onboard Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloons: neutron bubble chambers and X-ray/gamma-ray Geiger tubes sensitive to energies between 10 keV and 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.

Column definitions: (1) The flight number; (2) The maximum dose rate during the flight, expressed in units of natural radiation at sea level; (3) The maximum altitude of the plane in feet above sea level; (4) Departure city; (5) Arrival city; (6) Duration of the flight.

SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Approximately once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies ( #1, #2, #3, #4) linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 18% since 2015:

The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Reneger-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Reneger and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.

En route to the stratosphere, our sensors also pass through aviation altitudes:

In this plot, dose rates are expessed as multiples of sea level. For instance, we see that boarding a plane that flies at 25,000 feet exposes passengers to dose rates ~10x higher than sea level. At 40,000 feet, the multiplier is closer to 50x.

The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.

Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation.

  Essential web links
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
  The official U.S. government space weather bureau
Atmospheric Optics
  The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena.
Solar Dynamics Observatory
  Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever.
STEREO
  3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
  Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO.
Daily Sunspot Summaries
  from the NOAA Space Environment Center
NOAA 27-Day Space Weather Forecasts
  fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong.
Aurora 30 min forecast
  from the NOAA Space Environment Center
Heliophysics
  the underlying science of space weather
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