Large sun-grazing comets could bring on the sort of global electronics meltdown usually associated with electromagnetic pulse weapons or a full-scale nuclear exchange, says David Eichler, lead author of a forthcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters paper positing that a sun-grazing comet roughly the size of Hale-Bopp (with a nucleus some 30 kms in diameter), could trigger cosmic ray-generating shockwaves large enough to initiate a global electromagnetic Armageddon.
Eichler, an astrophysicist at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, argues that satellites that weren’t in protection mode would be wiped out along with most of the world’s electronics — everything from micro-circuitry on cell phones to full-scale power stations.
If such a comet were the size of Hale-Bopp, Eichler says, the resulting solar flare would by far be the largest ever observed.
The comet gets compressed and then explodes in the solar atmosphere which, in turn, creates shockwaves, says Eichler.
Eichler thinks that such a sun-grazing comet may have triggered a large solar flare and cosmic ray-generating shockwaves as recently as 775 A.D., as indicated by tree ring analysis pointing to a sudden 1.2 percent spike in atmospheric Carbon 14.
“I’m not saying that [event] couldn’t have been caused by a magnetic solar flare, but we’ve never seen a solar flare nearly that big,” said Eichler.
Although the motion of such a sun-grazer would be the source of the shockwaves’ energy, the actual particle acceleration would happen within the sun’s magnetic field, explains Eichler.
Travellng at a 1000 kms per second, the shockwaves would reach earth in about a day and a half. And the effects would likely be much worse than the 1859 Carrington Event, a solar superstorm that wreaked havoc on telegraph lines and caused the aurora borealis to be visible as far south as Texas.
“From the looks of the tree ring data, fortunately, such events don’t happen but once every several thousand years,” said Eichler. “But by my estimates such a comet event might be 30 times stronger than the Carrington Event.”
Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedormin ... rmageddon/
Picture from the tv series Terra Nova, episode 6, where a meteor exploded and triggered an EMP
So the question is: Will there be a doomsday this year instead(in december)?
