Sun BELCHES twice, mighty plasma loops miss Earth - NASA vid The Sun lashed out with two plasma eruptions one after the other early on Friday morning. NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) spotted the solar flares, when red-hot loops of plasma burst out of the surface of the Sun. The flares both happened within a four-hour window between 6am and 10am GMT, when prominences in the Sun …
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Lets see, distance of Earth from Sun, 150 Million Km Therefore the surface area of the sphere around the earths orbit is, hmm 4.PI.R^2 = 2.8 x 10^17 sq Km. Radius of the earth is 6400 Km, so the area of the earth is the area of a circle of this radius, so PI.r^2 = 1.3 x 10^7 sq Km.
So the ratio of these gives us the probability that a random solar flare will hit earth. or approx 2 x 10^9, or 1 in 2 Billion.
If you start at the sun, pick a random direction and fire something tiny, like the moon then the chance of hitting the Earth are about 1 in 2 billion. Coronal mass ejections are big - similar to the size of the sun when they start. They spread out. I could not find an decisive figure for how much they spread out. The closest I could find to a useful number was 0.25au long. If we pretend that CME's are 0.25au wide when they pass Earth orbit (1au) then the chances of a hit are about 1 in 250.
If someone knows a vaguely sensible number for the diameter of a CME when gets 1au from the sun, please speak up. I have almost no confidence in that 0.25au guess.
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