AUG 2, 2010 - Complex Eruption on the Sun is the breaking cosmic news story for the week, courtesy of SpaceWeather.com. On August 1st, there was a complex, massive disturbance in the Sun, on the face of the star pointed right at our home planet. Most of the Sun's northern hemisphere was involved in the disturbance, which included a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami and a massive filament eruption. As a result of these events, a coronal mass ejection (CME, a chunk of the local star) is now headed for Earth. When it hits tomorrow, high latitude geomagnetic storms and auroras are a certainty. Because this is only a C3-class flare - fairly low on the intensity spectrum - we're not likely to see the more extreme consequences of solar interaction with our home planet: things like failure in components of our satellite system and electrical infrastructure. This is a wake-up call, not a catastrophe. At the very least, it reminds us that our home is cosmic, we are cosmic. We are not a thing apart from the cosmos: we're in it, and it's in us. This has been the essence of astrology for millennia. It's about to be news.
