The pictures of the flares are really something when you consider how incredibly bright the sun is normally.
This one sentence irked me a bit though: "We don’t have a great way of forecasting solar flares, and they hit the Earth too quickly for NOAA to provide airline companies with advance notice (it takes about eight minutes for sunlight to reach us)."
Those are two true statements, but they aren't really related. Regardless of how many light minutes away the sun was, it wouldn't make any difference, because even if we had a satellite right near the sun watching for flares, there would be no way to get a signal back to earth _faster_ than the light.
I'm assuming what the scientist meant was that after any warning signs of a flare, the flare itself comes too quickly to have useful warning. (Which is completely unrelated to the time it takes the light (either from the warning signs or from the flare itself) to reach the Earth.)
This one sentence irked me a bit though: "We don’t have a great way of forecasting solar flares, and they hit the Earth too quickly for NOAA to provide airline companies with advance notice (it takes about eight minutes for sunlight to reach us)."
Those are two true statements, but they aren't really related. Regardless of how many light minutes away the sun was, it wouldn't make any difference, because even if we had a satellite right near the sun watching for flares, there would be no way to get a signal back to earth _faster_ than the light.
I'm assuming what the scientist meant was that after any warning signs of a flare, the flare itself comes too quickly to have useful warning. (Which is completely unrelated to the time it takes the light (either from the warning signs or from the flare itself) to reach the Earth.)