Two months left...

[Targan]

Originally Posted by Webstral

Now that's exciting! A & B orbit sufficiently distantly from each other that the habitable zone of both planets lies within the "safe" distance about each star; i.e., the gravity from the companion star would not perturb the orbit of a planet orbiting either star within the life zones. Too cool.

One of the more popular theories surrounding the formation of earth-like planets is that, in our solar system, the gravitational influences of Jupiter and Saturn perturbed the orbits of comets in the Oort Cloud, bringing the comets into the inner system where some of them dumped their water on the Earth and Mars.

The Alpha Centauri A-B-Proxima system doesn't seem to have any large gas giants but the weird interactions of the 3 stars as they orbit each other may have fulfilled a similar role in bringing comets into the habital zones. It's not out of the question that there could be one or more rocky planets in one of the habital zones that received enough cometary water to end up with an Earth-like land-water mix.

[Cdnwolf]

The sun unleased a powerful solar flare late Monday (Oct. 22), releasing waves of radiation into space that have already caused a short radio blackout on Earth.

The flare erupted from the sunspot AR 11598 (short for Active Region 11598), and reached peak brightness at 11:22 p.m. EDT (0322 GMT this morning, Oct. 23), according to scientists working on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a space telescope that constantly monitors the sun with high-definition cameras. It ranked as an X1.8 solar flare, one of the strongest types of solar flares, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) run by NOAA and the National Weather Service.

The same sunspot produced three strong flares before this one in just the two days since it became visible from Earth's perspective. "This means more flares are probably in the offing, and they will become increasingly Earth-directed as the sunspot turns toward our planet in the days ahead," astronomer Tony Phillips

The sun is getting more and more active lately as it approaches an expected peak of magnetic activity in January 2013.

[pmulcahy11b]

Hmmm...may be a coincidence, but my Time Warner-based internet, TV, and phone went down at about noon for fifteen minutes or so.