Stuff You Should Know - Space Weather - What's That?!

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Did you know space has weather? It’s true! In our solar system, tons – literal tons – of highly charged gas and magnetized particles spew from the surface constantly, causing all sorts of weird stuff here on Earth. So far, nothing too bad has happened. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there and Jerry's not here, but we're going to make it through somehow. In this edition of Stuff You Should Know,

I'm going to call this one Chuck the Icarus edition because we made it through the Sun podcast just hanging on by our fingernails before. And through just an astounding act of hubris, we're going to do another Sun related episode. Yeah, we talked about a lot of this stuff in the Sun one. Yeah, we did, but I don't think we went anywhere near into this kind of detail. So I'm feeling okay about redoing this. Good. Doing something that that's like kind of a redo a little bit. Okay. Are you feeling okay? I'm feeling great. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. I don't know if I would say I'm feeling great, but that's good that you are at least. So we're talking about the Sun, believe it or not. And we're talking about a specific thing on the Sun called solar flares,

which you may have heard of, but you may not know much about unless apparently you've already listened to our Sun episode. But we'll talk a little bit about solar flares. But one of the things that I think is extraordinarily interesting about solar flares is they belong to a larger category called space weather. And I am just as jazzed as can be about the idea of space weather, aren't you? Not as jazzed as you, I don't think, but I do think this is pretty neat stuff. And I'm glad we're getting a chance to make it more clear than we did before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a good, that's a good point. I'm sure we talked about this before, but it's probably extremely confusing. So yeah, we're going to clear all that up. So space weather, especially stuff

that comes from the Sun, comes mostly from the surface or the atmosphere of the Sun, which is extraordinarily active. It's extraordinarily hot, so hot, Chuck, that the surface of the Sun is made of plasma, which a lot of people consider the fourth state of matter. It's like a gas, but it's a special kind of gas that where the particles are as jazzed about being alive as I am about the idea of space weather. That's right. They're supercharged. And when they are moving around, they create something called magnetic fields, not the band, the thing, even though it is a great band name and a great band. And they are going to, you know, magnetic fields have their own effect on all these particles and what's going on up there. Yeah. So the energetic electrons that

have been stripped from the atoms creating electrons and ions, which have a charge, they create magnetic fields and then the magnetic fields they create have an effect on them. So that they tend to follow these magnetic field lines, but the stuff is so energetic and so hot that the magnetic fields that develop aren't like this kind of orderly lines that keep their distance, you know, nice and tidy, like you imagine like a magnetic field to exist like. These things are like roiling, curling, twisting. It's just a big orgy of magnetism up there. That's the only way to put it. That's it. I had no choice but to say it like that. Yeah. And then, you know, this stuff is going on. It's called solar activity and it depends on

when you're observing the sun. It's going to be more or less active. There's a cycle. It's called the solar cycle that happens about every 11 years when the magnetic north and south pole switch and within that cycle, there's something called a solar maximum, which is the period kind of where the biggest show is going on. Yeah. There's also a solar minimum, but the solar maximum is we're in solar cycle 25 apparently, and the solar maximum is coming up on in 2025. That's right. Very appropriately. And so, as we're reaching the solar maximum, there's going to be a lot more of what people call sunspots by people, I mean astronomers of course. And sunspots are these kind of

darkish areas on the surface of the sun. They can be little tiny dots. They can be kind of big, but they look really, really small and they look dark. And the reason they look dark is because they're relatively cool compared to the rest of the surface that's around them. But even still, they're super-duper hot and they're still pretty bright comparatively speaking. Yeah. Like a sunspot is about 6,500 degrees Fahrenheit because we're talking about the sun, so cool is a relative term here. And as far as bright goes, it's about 10 times as bright as a full moon. So if you go out at night in a full moon and it kind of feels like a little cool daylight, a sunspot is about 10 times brighter than that. So you shouldn't go looking at these

things. No, no, no. That's a really good thing to say. We're talking about a lot of stuff that's going to make you want to look at the sun. Don't do it. Just go online and look at pictures of this stuff on the sun or videos even. We have videos thanks to the good people at NASA. But the sunspots, so it really just goes to show you how hot and bright the surface of the sun is that these things seem cool and dark by comparison. And huge. Yeah, and they are really, really big. So the width of them can get to be up to 30,000 miles across, which is about the width of Neptune, which is huge, or about four times the width of Earth. And still they look super dinky compared to the sun. The reason that these things are cooler, Chuck, is because they're spots of magnetism

that are so strong that they keep the heat inside the sun from poking out right there. That's how strong the magnetic energy is in these areas. Yeah, and that's right. And because they're magnets, they form in little pairs like little buddies and they appear on the surface of the sun. And what we're actually looking at, if you can like go to NASA or whatever, like you said, and see a picture of a sunspot, what you're looking at is sort of like the two ends of if you think about these magnetic lines, they're these magnetism. It's like a filament, like a rope. Just picture them twisted up, basically, running beneath the sun surface. And there are some really, really cool pictures of stuff. And then one end of this sunspot is

positive. The other end is negative. And it's they sort of act like rings of a tree a little bit, as far as astronomers can like observe these things, the first sunspots of each cycle are in the mid-latitudes, and then they start moving around during the cycle. So they can kind of see where you are in the solar cycle by where and how many of these sunspots there are. Yeah, so the closer to the solar maximum you are, the more sunspots they're going to be, and the closer they're going to be to the equator. So they tell a lot about where the sun is in its solar cycle. But the thing is when these magnetic field lines twists and curve and turn, they actually can interact with other magnetic field lines. And when that happens, when they cross kind of

like the proton streams crossing and ghostbusters, when that happens, something called a solar flare happens. It's an event on the sun, and it is such a huge, magnificently energetic event that it actually can affect earth, things on earth, because it's just so massive and such a huge release and sudden release of energy. I had a ghostbusters ref penciled in later on, if you believe that. Oh, I can't wait to hear it. It's been a long time when we both have two, or we both have one each. Yeah, it has. And it's been a while since we listed dates by the years before since ghostbusters came in. Mine has a date attached to it. You'll just have to wait. I can't wait. What a great episode this is shaping up to be.

So these explosions, the magnetic fields are driving these explosions. And if you're laypeople like us, you can either look at this as something that's kind of simple to look at on its surface, or if you really want to get into it, it's pretty complex and not easily understood. But the simple answer is, because we're talking about magnetic fields, is that these adjacent fields are pointing in opposite directions, and they basically wipe each other out, and that releases all this magnetic energy and all that heat kind of everywhere that surrounds it. It just goes spew, spew, spew, energy, heat shooting at you from the sun, right? Sure. So people have figured this out finally. That has to do with the lines of magnetism

interacting with one another and annihilating one another. But there's a big mystery attached to this, or there was for many, many years. And that is that, okay, so we understand magnetic annihilation, but to this point, we thought it took about 10,000 years for two opposite magnetic fields to annihilate one another. While we're talking about here, these solar flares, they annihilate one another and release all this energy in a matter of minutes, maybe an hour sometimes. So that does a quite job. And I think back in the 50s, some scientists started proposing a type of magnetic energy release called magnetic reconnection. And that is where magnetic field lines are so twisty, turny, writhy, and energetic that they can actually rip a field line or like

a magnetic field line can rip apart and then reconnect with some neighbors. When that happens, it's called magnetic reconnection. And they think that that is the kind of energetic release that would account for a solar flare. Yeah. And this, you know, this can cause all kinds of problems for things in space and for people on Earth even, which we'll get to that stuff in more detail a little bit later. But the point is, these things are super hot. They burst out to the sun's corona, which if you remember from our sun episode, that's the outermost atmosphere of the sun. Rarified gas is all over the place out there. And it has, I mean, this is super, super hot stuff. Like normally, the temperature and the corona is about a few

million degrees Kelvin. But inside that flare, we're talking 10 to 20 million degrees Kelvin. And we always like to think of things in terms of either Big Macs or hydrogen bombs. And in this case, it's got to be hydrogen bombs. The amount of energy released during a solar flare is about, it's millions of 100 ton hydrogen bombs all at once. Yeah. All at once. That's a really, that's a really important point too, you know. And I feel like a real schmo for not having calculated that in Big Macs, calories. That's got to be size. I know you could do calories. Yeah, but what's the calorie of a solar flare? I don't know. I didn't look. And I feel like a jackass for not having looked. Well, they go down easy. I know that. They do. So,

they're big huge releases of energy and they're releases of radiation. They release radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. And that includes the visible light spectrum. So, these things just turn into these enormously bright flares, which is where the name comes from. And we've figured out how to classify. And there's a classifying system for solar flares. That's a lot like the Richter scale in that there's class A, B, C, M, and X. That's not really like the Richter scale. What's like the Richter scale is that each of those classes is 10 times more powerful than the previous class. Yeah. So, like an X is the highest. That is 10 times an M, 100 times a C. And then once you get to X, if they didn't go Y and Z, they just said, let's stick

with X and then let's start. Sounds cool. Sure. Oh, it sounds totally cool. And then let's start attaching numbers to them so you can have X one, two, three, four, and so on. Yeah. And so, each of those letter grades has a one through nine scale. But X is so huge that X's scale goes beyond nine. And I think the biggest one that they've ever caught so far that's ever been recorded burned out the sensors that were recording it. And the sensors were overloaded at X-28. And they did some calculations after the fact. And they figured out that it may have been an X-45 flare back on November 4th, 2003. Yeah. This was a big deal. This was, it was something called the Halloween storms of 2003, which is kind of a fun way.

You know, it happened because it was in October and near Halloween. So, all the astronomers got excited. And this one was a little bit weird because although it was near the solar maximum, it was two to three years after the peak. And it was, they said, NASA said it's generally a quiet period. So, they got really, really excited. There were 17 major flares in that Halloween storm. And it was, that's something that is really going to get the white coats pretty charged up. It totally is. I mean, an X-45, that's just astounding. And I did a little bit of a derivative calculation. Technically, it would be a AA5. AA5? You know, I saw weird different numbers too though. I saw that the sensor cut out at 15 and the estimate was X-28. So,

it's really hard. So, NASA even had conflicting information. I think we should point this out. You just set us up for a COA that I wanted to include. So, there's two things. There's a lot of disagreement on exactly what a solar flare is and the difference between that and coronal mass ejections, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And it's not necessarily a disagreement in astronomy. It's a disagreement among people who report on stuff like astronomy and don't fully understand what they're talking about. So, we ran into that quite a bit. So, if we get something mixed up, please forgive us. And then secondly, when we're talking about some of these incredible events in physics terms, people who are in the

field of physics understand what they're talking about to one another. But they have a great reputation of not figuring out how to explain it to the rest of us. And so, they'll put it in different terms. And so, when you're researching this stuff, you're like, is this describing a different thing than this over here? Or is it just two different people describing the same thing two different ways? Because they're not describing it in the true physics way because I wouldn't understand. So, we ran into that a lot too, did you? Yeah. And it's frustrating to literally see two different things both from nasa.gov on two different pages. But who are we to call out NASA? I think we just did. We'll call out Space Force. Sure. But the point is this, all of that really

underscores the fact that our understanding of the dynamics on the sun are still really early and premature. And we're still figuring a lot of stuff out, including classifying the differences between solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Yeah. And the light show and the, you know, the fun that the astronomers had in the Halloween storms of 2003 was immense, no matter whether it was X-28 or X-45. That's right. They partied either way. They sure did. They surely did check. They had a little bit of peach schnapps and went to bed at 10.30. Toasted some, a half a shot of brandy and then went to bed. That's right. Prove us wrong, nerds. Prove us wrong. I say we take a break and then come back and talk about those coronal mass ejections that I teased.

Sure. Okay. We'll be right back, everybody. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you

through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars, if

you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So I was saying that it's difficult sometimes to discern the difference between

a solar flare, which is a huge burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, all at once, which by the way, takes just a matter of minutes, eight minutes to be exact, to reach Earth because we're talking about carriers of the electromagnetic force, which can travel at the speed of light. So it's, we're, I guess, eight minutes at the speed of light from the sun, right? Right. Coronal mass ejections are something different, even though they seem to be associated with solar flares in a lot of cases. They also seem to be able to kind of stand on their own too. Either way, they're impressive in their own right, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think if you were talking in terms of visual excitement, like a solar mass, I'm sorry,

a coronal mass ejection is like a full-on Grateful Dead concert, whereas a solar flare is like when John Mayer played with members of the Grateful Dead. Oh, that's mean. I was going to say, it's just an Instagram video lesson of John Mayer teaching you some Grateful Dead licks, because it does that, you know. Well, but solar flares are more magnificent than that. So, man, that's mean. Sorry, John Mayer, if you're listening. I'm not sorry. Josh is sorry. He's a nice guy. He apparently has... I've seen some stuff like of him teaching people how to play Grateful Dead guitar stuff, and it's really, really hard what he's doing. So, my hat's off too. Jerry Garcia. Right. So, with... Man, I feel weird. I just

apologize to John Mayer on the stuff you should know episode about solar flares. You didn't see that coming? No, I didn't. I wasn't in my notes. So, with coronal mass ejections at least, these are not necessarily just bursts of radiation like a solar flare is. They do have some radiation attached, but their big thing is particles, highly charged super energetic particles that it shoots like buckshot toward the earth at incredible speeds. I mean, they get accelerated very close to the speed of light, not the speed of light. And there's a big difference between the speed of light and close to the speed of light. So, it takes about three or four days usually for stuff that's shot out by a coronal mass ejection to reach earth. But when these things go off on

the sun, they're, like you said, they're rather impressive. Yeah, like if you were looking at this stuff with a telescope and a high powered telescope that is, I don't think you could... Well, could you see any of this stuff? With anything you have at home? I know I've got a pretty good telescope, but it's for nighttime viewing only. So, with the... I think you can see coronal mass ejections. I think solar flares, you're best with a radio telescope or an x-ray telescope, but the x-ray telescope would have to be outside of earth's magnetosphere. Do you have a telescope? Yeah, a telescope. It's not a radio telescope. No, no, no. I just... We've never talked... We've never scoped it up in conversation and I would be surprised if you didn't, but I'm glad

to know you do. We do have one, yeah. So, flares, like if you were looking through an x-ray or a radio telescope at a solar flare, it'll look cool. It'll look like a flash of light, but those coronal mass ejections are really impressive. Big eruptions, the height can be many times the size of the earth shooting out into space, like you said. They're kind of like a belch from the sun that actually releases part of the sun. It's like a bubble of plasma that's just enormous, often billions and billions of tons in mass just coming right at the earth full of these incredibly charged particles and they're so big, so massive, and the plasma that they're made of is so energetic that they actually have their own magnetic fields, like the sun or the earth.

So, when they finally do come in contact with the planet, our planet, weird things start to happen because its own magnetic field and all of the charged particles within the plasma contact our own magnetosphere and then also our atmosphere, which is almost designed to deter the worst effects of those things coming at us from the sun. Yeah, so our magnetosphere, that's our little first layer of protection. That would be like, although I was about to say like Wakanda's protective shield, that may be more like the ionosphere, but the magnetosphere is that first protection and it's going to kind of brush away as many of those charged particles, these protons that are shooting out as possible and because of solar wind though, it's got a shape to it. The magnetosphere has

like a sort of a compressed side that faces the sun, it's got a little dip near the poles of the earth where some really magnificent stuff is going to take place as we'll see in a minute and then it's got this tail end that flows out from the back and the earth's magnetic field is going to block these particles from most of the surface. The solar wind is going to push them along toward that tail and in that dip at the poles is where you're going to see these really brilliant auroras. Yes, but the magnetism, the magnetic energy from the coronal mass ejection can be so energetic that it can actually push on the sun side, the day side of the earth's magnetosphere, it's closest to the sun, push on it so much that it actually contorts the night

side, the tail end that trails off into space and presses it together so that when it comes together, the earth's own magnetosphere becomes energetic and quivery and then when it goes back to its normal energy state, it releases a bunch of energy in the form of light and when that happens, the auroras that tend to congregate at the poles can actually show up all over the planet, basically even very close to the equator. Yeah, which is crazy and we'll talk about some of the bigger ones and some of the surprising places they showed up, but so that's the magnetosphere. I mentioned the ionosphere, that's sort of a, I guess, a secondary protection. That is another high layer of the earth's atmosphere and that's going to stop all the radiation because it's giving out a

tremendous amount of radiation and if the ionosphere wasn't doing its job and it wasn't there, we would be in big, big trouble. Oh yeah, we'd be toast. I mean, these are incredibly energetic, fast-traveling particles close to the speed of light and they would just shoot right through the tissue in our bodies and do all sorts of damage because they would probably knock all sorts of electrons off of our atoms that make up our cells and our tissue and we would either develop cancer over the long term or just drop dead from a big enough dose of this stuff. So thank goodness for the ionosphere. I mean, it saves us like John Mayer saved the grateful dead just in case he's still listening. There's like a percentage of our audience that's like,

yeah man, preach and there's a percentage that is like, oh my god, I have to turn this off. And then I'd say the vast majority are like, who is this John Mayer cat? Exactly. See the guy that dated Jen Aniston? Probably. He is. So you got the magnetosphere, you got the ionosphere and for the most part, these things are capable of absorbing the worst of the sun's belches and flare-ups and everything under normal circumstances. But even when it is protecting life on earth like us animals and the plants and the plankton and the whales, that kind of stuff, life here on earth,

there are things that we humans have developed that can be affected by this space weather, by these geomagnetic storms. Yeah, I guess should we talk about the Carrington event, one of the most exciting events? I thought it was pretty exciting, yes. It's pretty good. So this is 1859, like this kind of thing now is pretty magnificent, but I imagine 1859 astronomers were just really, really knocked out by something like this. They said, Zeus is beard. Yeah, exactly. This is sort of late summer, August, September and a big solar storm.

They later called the Carrington event, became the strongest one on record. And this is named for a man named Richard Carrington. He was an astronomer, one of England's best at the time. And he was in his observatory and he was hanging out. And it was a sunny day and he was working with his telescope and he's projecting this image of the sun on a screen and drawing. There were cameras at the time, but I guess the most, I don't know, accurate or efficient way to capture what he saw was to draw this stuff that he's observing. And that's what he was doing on September 1st, 1859. Yeah. And while he was drawing this stuff, he saw that some of these sunspots that he was mapping, I guess, started to grow really, really bright. And he got really

excited because he'd been doing this for a while and this wasn't something he'd seen before. So he jumped up and he ran to get a friend who was going to witness this. Big mistake. Yeah. He said he was gone for a minute tops. And when he came back, he found that these brilliant flashes of light had already started to like weaken. Can you imagine? He was a little bummed about this, but he and his buddy still watched these flares like go, you know, get lower and lower and then turn into pinpoints and then vanish. So what he saw, he was the first person to record a solar flare. No one had ever seen anything like it before. And that was at 11, 11, 23 AM, it was, it was done. It finished. And then nothing, there was it until the wee hours of the morning,

later that night, the morning of the next day, later that night, which I always just find endlessly confusing. What, that it took that long? No, that it's the next, that night is the next morning. For some reason, it just breaks my brain every time. I realize how sad that is to admit. Yeah. So in the wee hours, the skies put on a light show all over the earth, red, green, purple auroras, very brilliant, very exciting newspapers. You could like read the newspaper at night. They saw this stuff in Hawaii, El Salvador and the Bahamas. They saw the auroras in the Bahamas. Isn't that nuts? That is nuts. There were towns, neighboring towns that thought the, that like Shelbyville was on fire. Springfield thought Shelbyville was on fire and vice versa.

There were birds chirping because they thought it was dawn. There was a brick mason crew in South Carolina that got up and, you know, they were like two beers in going to work when they realized that, hey, it's the middle of the night. Right. And they looked at each other and said, man, this is 125 years before Ghostbusters. Oh, nice. Very nice, Chuck. Yeah. Well, it seemed canned then because it was premeditated. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. How about this? I'm going to give you a huge hearty surprise laugh and we'll edit out the conversation before. How about that? All right. Ready? And they all looked at each other two beers in and said, Ghostbusters won't even come out for another 125 years. What? Oh my God. I did not see that

coming, dude. How long has it been since we talked about it? I don't know. That's perfect. And we'll just fix that all on editing. That's great. Thanks, Chuck. I need a couple of beers myself after that one. So one of the other things that really went haywire was the telegraph system, right? Yeah. Because this is 1859 and the telegraphs were at the, they were the, the leading edge, not bleeding edge. You taught me that that's totally wrong. The leading edge of technology, of telecommunications at the time. And these telegraph lines depended on currents being sent over wires. And so those wires were overloaded by this geomagnetic storm. So much so that sparks were shooting off of the telegraphs. Operators were getting shocked and burned. The telegraph paper

was catching on fire when it was nearby. It was very much like a movie. All this is happening all over the world at the same time. It's just crazy. It's like very, very early morning of the next day after the Carrington event, right? So one of the things that got me was they, they, they unplugged the batteries to these things, the telegraphs. And they found that the, the wires were still so energetic with electricity from the geomagnetic storm that they could still send telegraphs even though they, they had no power of their own. They were, they were able to send telegrams over the telegraph line, even with them disconnected from the batteries. That's the fact of the show to me. Oh, well, thanks for letting me have that one.

I mean, they must have thought it was haunted or something. I think so. In 1859, you know, like, sure, the plug is unplugged and it's still working. They were like, Zeus's beard, this is crazy. There's another thing too. Some telegraph operators couldn't send telegraphs even though the lines were active because the, the magnetism in these currents was so strong that the armature, the thing that they tap up and down was like fused to the plate beneath it. It was just the magnet, the magnetism was so strong it wouldn't move. I thought you were going to say they thought it was possessed. So they like left the room screaming. They did. Zeus's beard.

Oh, we got the third one in there. Yeah. Should we take another break? Oh, almost. So, so one other thing, let's just wrap the Carrington event up real quick. Okay. So 10 a.m. the effects of this whole crazy event are, are done. And, you know, it gets talked about. This is a worldwide event, but it's kind of like treated as a scientific anomaly, right? People, people understand what happened and what caused it and why it happened over the years as we learn more and more about solar flares and coronal mass ejections. But it didn't become apparent that this Carrington event was actually a harbinger of like real much bigger problems that could happen to us alive on earth today until the 70s. And maybe we'll take a break, Chuck,

and come back and talk about how that could be problematic right after this. Great. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass, the hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're

going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So the world changed a lot between the Carrington event and the mid-1800s and in the 1970s when scientists had a much bigger handle on what this kind of thing meant. And in the 1970s, we were, the whole world was very dependent on electric power, you might be surprised to learn. Right. And they knew like, hey, if we had another Carrington event today, it could be a big deal because, and we'll get to this later, but like, we got a lot of metal on this earth. And we use the earth to ground everything basically with ground wires. And that creates a unique problem potentially if we had another event like this. Yeah. The fact that we chose to use the earth as a ground to where our grounding wires go from

our electrical components, tie into a metal rod that's driven into the earth so that whenever excess electricity is generated by the electronics that we use, it gets distributed through the grounding wire to the earth where it dissipates. That makes all of our electronics vulnerable to a geomagnetic storm because in a geomagnetic storm, the ground itself can become magnetized. And even more than that, Chuck, we've buried a lot of metal infrastructure from like pipes to cables to all sorts of metal stuff is snaking through the ground right now. And when the ground becomes magnetized in a geomagnetic storm, it can carry really powerful currents through all the infrastructure up through the grounds, through the grounding wires into our

electronic components, including things like power transformers and overload them to the point where they fail catastrophically. Yeah. And this sort of happened in August, 1972. There was a big, big solar flare that knocked out our long distance phone communication across Illinois. So that was just sort of an early example of like, hey, this can actually have a real effect here on earth. And that was that was a big one. It took, I think about 15 hours to hit earth, whereas it usually takes two to three days. Right. It also set off these we had it was we had it was during Vietnam, obviously, and we had magnetic sea mines in harbors around Vietnam. It exploded those. Yeah. So I don't know if they were supposed to be like secretly there. And if

that was kind of like, oh, oops, sorry about that. Or if they knew that they were there and they just went off. But either way, that was a pretty scary scene. It was. And apparently, it was a mystery for a long time until somebody finally figured out why those sea mines all went off. They connected it to the to that coronal mass ejection, I believe. Yeah, but you can imagine like all the damage that could occur, like, even if you're just talking about the electrical grid, if it really blew out, it wouldn't be just like a blackout, like it would destroy parts of our electrical grid such that it would take it's not like, hey, let me go out and fix this over a few hours during a snowstorm. It's it might take weeks or months, or even up to a

year if we had a big enough like blast to the grid. Yeah, because I mean, it is by necessity, our electrical grid is interconnected. So if one part of it gets overloaded, that can overload other parts that are connected. And if you have a whole city without power for, let's say Los Angeles went out of power for a month, what would happen? What would be the outcome of that? I mean, you couldn't do anything. And when you start thinking like that, you start thinking about, oh my God, like think about all the stuff we do that requires electricity. Everything we do requires electricity in some form or fashion. And so to be without electricity in a major city or multiple major cities for even a couple of weeks is just unthinkable. But that's that's the level of

vulnerability we're at because of the way that our electrical components are set up because they're grounded. Yeah. And I'm not just like a chain reaction, apocalyptic kind of activity, but just monetary loss, like the economic and financial damage for the city of Los Angeles to be without power for a month would be astounding. Right. So, you know, there's stuff they could do. They could they could fit some very critical transformers with resistors and capacitors. But these things are like hundreds of thousand dollars per transformer. So that's just too much money. So they're not doing that. No, they're not. And I wonder if there's going to be like some close call that makes everybody

like, okay, we need to invest this in our infrastructure, or, you know, are we going to figure out some other means of, you know, a backup system? I'm not sure. Or that happens to like Topeka. And then everyone says, hey, if this happened in Topeka, and they lost, you know, several hundred dollars. And that's really mean. I was going to say, did you think, do you think Topeka would do it? That's so mean. Do you think that would convince anybody? I don't know. I'm so sorry, Topeka, but you get my point. If it happens somewhere sort of

in a smaller area, then the big cities might say, hey, that means it could happen to us, the people who really matter. Right. The coastal elites would stroke their beards and pluck their tongues. Yeah. So, yeah, there doesn't seem to be a lot of initiative right now to figure this out. We're just kind of sitting ducks in a weird way. It's nothing, I don't think it's anything to lose sleep over, but it's really surprising. Like the more I dug into this, the more I was like, huh, this could kind of be a thing someday. And it's not just, you know, the electrical grid here on earth alone is all that would be affected by that.

Things we rely on out in space, like satellites, a bad enough geomagnetic storm could affect satellites in a lot of ways. So our GPS systems would be messed up. Or if you, so if you use GPS for really important stuff, like say landing an airplane, you could be in big trouble. And if you're also on planes, the high frequency radio communications they use to stay in contact with the ground, especially when they're out over the ocean or something like that, that can be disrupted by a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection too. Yeah. Or what about a satellite maybe that is, I mean, there are thousands of satellites up there, but, and, you know, if a radio satellite went out, it would be bad, but people could live. But

what if it affected a satellite that's in charge of aiding in national defense? Things could get a little bit scary if those satellites were down or, you know, spacecraft, they're spacecraft up there and they use satellites to help orient themselves and keep themselves safe. There's an ISS, although the ISS supposedly is protected, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. The big threat to astronauts from coronal mass ejections and solar flares is when they're out on spacewalks, when they're doing like labor, say outside the ISS or something like that. Just like here on Earth, if we didn't have the ionosphere or the magnetosphere, we would be in big trouble. Astronauts can be in big trouble. The ISS orbits within the Earth's

magnetosphere, but it's beyond the ionosphere, so they are a little more exposed. On the ISS, it's shielded, so they're not nearly as exposed. But out on a spacewalk, they, if it were a really bad coronal mass ejection, they could be in a lot of trouble. Yeah, like Sandra Westerface in that movie. Exactly. What is her last name? I can't remember. Sandra Bernhardt? No. Sandra Bullock. Sandy Duncan. Sandra Bullock. Sandra Bullock. Yeah, right. Sandra Bernhardt. In that movie, Space Trot. Space craziness. Did you like that movie, Gravity? Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. I've only seen it once. Me too. I don't know if I would have cast her necessarily, but that's fine. Yeah. Or George Clooney. I don't think I would have cast either of them.

I mean, I had some issues. I mean, it was a magnificent looking movie, but I think in the end, I had some issues with the story in the script being like not good enough for how great of a movie it was trumped up to be. Was that the guy who did the Revenant? I think so, yeah. So you and I went and saw the Revenant in Hawaii once when we were on vacation, because what else is there to do in Hawaii on vacation but go see movies? Yes. And we saw the Revenant and this person next to us was there by himself and he was so upset by Tom Hardy's character and just how evil he was that this guy was telling him he was the devil. He had his hand up at the screen and was praying against Tom Hardy. He was really affected

by Tom Hardy's character, which made the movie even more thrilling because we would look at the movie and then we would watch the person reacting to the movie too. So it was something to see. Yeah, I saw that once as well and I saw it on tour with you. It was either Phoenix or San Diego. I would have to look at the dates, but I just remember there being palm trees. I think it was San Diego, maybe when we did a show at that spooky abandoned church. Man, I'm convinced still to this day that that's the church from the Prince of Darkness that John Carson movie. That was a weird show because that was the one I know you remember that guy sat on the front row and shot the whole thing with a video camera. And he looked like he was mad too, like he was

documenting evidence or something to use against us. We both were like, I think we were so caught off guard. We didn't know what to say. Do we call this guy on and say, sir, can you please put away your camera? So we just soldered on. Yeah, we were pinned down by the unrelenting glare of the lens. Then he went back to his apartment and showed it on TV to his roommate, who was the Tom Hardy guy. Right. And that guy was like, these guys are the devil. I'm praying against them. Oh, man. All right. So yes, back to the show. Oh, yeah. Where are we? Oh, here's the deal. We're talking about astronauts and satellite operations and GPS. This isn't stuff that we've just said, well, this probably could happen. A lot of it is, but this actually has happened.

We'd mentioned the thing in Illinois with the phone systems. And then in the 2003, that CME, that did disrupt satellites. And that did disrupt high frequency radio communications that aviation relies on. And that did black out a city in Sweden. Malmo. Everyone says, no, not Malmo. Yeah. Malmo, everybody. So this, the kind of thing can happen. It does happen. It's just never happened on such a massive scale. They figured out from looking at Arctic ice cores, apparently highly energetic particles leave remnants, not revenants, remnants in nitrates frozen in the ice at the poles. And by examining these cores, they can see how bad or how often or how many solar flares have hit earth in the past. And they figured out that the Carrington

event is like a 500 year solar flare. And it happened about 150, 170 years ago. Hopefully, we're in the clear. The key is, is we're still figuring out the dynamics of the sun and solar activity. So we're not exactly certain that maybe we're not due for a thousand year solar flare. We're just starting to figure this out. But we are figuring it out. That's step one. And we also actually have space weather forecasters here on earth at NOAA and at the National Weather Service. There are people whose job it is to track solar activity and to predict things like coronal mass ejections and solar flares so that people can like, like utility companies can maybe take steps to mitigate the worst effects eventually. I think right now we've got like eight to 10

minute heads up. So that's not enough. But as we get to understand it a little more, we'll have more warning time. And you know, astronauts can plan their space walks when they're out doing stuff like building future space colonies. This is all going to come into play for that too. Yeah. So hopefully they can get that up to at least over an hour. That would help. Sure. So again, it's nothing to lose sleep over. That's not the point of this episode. It's more just kind of like gee whiz. This is, this is amazing by Zeus's beard. I've never heard of anything like this. The old fourth reference. Yeah, surprising fourth one. Did not see that coming, did it? Did not. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, everybody. Chuck said he's got

nothing else. So that's it for this episode, which means it's time for listener mail. Let me see here. I've actually got quite a few today, which is an abundance. We've been getting more than usual, haven't we? Yeah, we've been getting good ones. All right, I'll choose this one. I'm going to call it Rush Girl. Hey guys, I've been a long time listener, but you have never, but I've never had a reason to write until your recent Fort Knox episode. In it, you refer to the joke you had made about women not liking the three stooges. By the way, I got a little grief for that and also support for that weirdly. Chuck made the comment that it wasn't like he had something, had said something true,

but they're like there being no women rush fans. I immediately laugh because my future mother-in-law is the biggest rush fan. I love this lady. She and my fiancé have a bond over this band. In contrast, I thought the band was made up just for the movie I Love You Man. Wow. Yeah, Megan did not know Rush was a real band. She thought that was a fake band in a movie. Megan, you have a whole world ready to open up to you. Yes, you do. I guess that they fit the trope. According to my fiancé, they call female rush fans getty-corns, which sounds made up, but he swears it's true. Getty-corns, I don't get that. Like a unicorn, maybe? Oh, yeah, exactly. Or it could be candy-corns.

No, no, I'm sure it's like the Getty Lee unicorn mashup. I like that. I didn't get that until just now, so thank you. At any rate, I can recognize the joke and I'm not coming after you for that. I just found it funny that all the stereotypical male bands you could have picked, you chose my mother-in-law's favorite. Thanks for all you do. Your podcast has gone a long way toward helping me de-stress after a day of teaching during COVID, and that is from Megan Power and Megan, thank you, and big ups to your mother-in-law for being a Getty-corn. Yeah, not to be confused with candy-corn. No. Well, if you want to be like Megan and let us know how we just totally blew your mind somehow or other, we'd love hearing that stuff. You can

put it in an email and wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so

we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.