Hi friends;
Because of COVID-19, several countries have decided to close their borders to limit the spread of the pandemic. As a result, air traffic is severely impacted and several lines are simply suspended. The daytime sky is almost free of airplane trails and the night sky is almost free of bright and fast moving dots (except for a few Starlink satellites but that’s another story). It is time to raise your head up and admire the sky as our ancestors once saw it.
Like that pandemic that came out of nowhere, I wondered, are there dangers that can happen to us from the sky and without us seeing them coming? I found two interesting ones:
- A solar coronal mass ejection is a plasma bubble produced at the surface of the sun. This ejection, as long as the earth is on its trajectory, can cause real damage: disruptions of electrical networks, overloading of electronic circuits, disruption of telephones, GPS and other satellites…, This event happens to our sun periodically and experts say that the next one will occur before 2030!
- For those who are not familiar with it, a gamma burst is a very brief (a few seconds) emission of very high energy gamma particles that appears randomly in space. The dominant theory is that these bursts are due to the gravitational collapse of a giant star. They are almost invisible, very unpredictable, super fast, and so energetic that they can wipe out life on earth.
END OF TRANSMISSION.