Joe Bennett: Here comes the... solar flare

This photo provided by Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare - the bright flash in the upper right. Photo / AP

OPINION

Did you notice the solar flare? Probably not, for in the run-up to Christmas, the one thing that matters is the run-up to Christmas, with the forces of commerce on all sides bellowing “spend, spend, spend” and bringing with them a host of additional and unwanted worries.

And besides, the solar flare happened last Friday night, when we on this side of the world were facing away from the sun, so even if we’d been up and about and staring skywards through smoked glass, we’d have been none the wiser. Nevertheless, it was quite something.

The flare erupted in the sun’s northwest corner - though quite what northwest means in the directionlessness of space, I cannot tell you. Solar flares are common, but this was a big one, spewing billions of tons of plasma into space. In North America, pilots reported heavy interference on their radio systems.

In South America, there was a two-hour black-out of high-frequency radio broadcasting. All this while we slept - assuming, that is, that we did sleep. For there is so much to organise in the run-up to Christmas, so many important things, that the mind whirrs like a quail’s wings and sleep can be elusive.

There’s the need to fill the house with food against the unimaginable horror of the supermarkets being closed for a day. There’s the need to find a gift for dear old Auntie Violet other than the ritual insult of yet more bath salts. And there’s the worry of whether Uncle Ray will stay sober long enough to get through lunch without a political discussion.

But even though we may be preoccupied with such important considerations, the boffins are there to attend to the sun on our behalf. In 2010, Nasa launched a spacecraft to monitor the sun.

It is the mission that never sleeps, that never knows nighttime. And if you rootle around on the internet, you can find Nasa’s film of the flare erupting, the moment when all that radiation was ejected from the pulsing heart of the sun and out into the unimaginability of space.

Or rather the moment eight minutes after the moment, when the evidence of the flare reached Earth, having travelled from there to here at the speed of light, a distance of 93 million miles.

And they’re 93 million miles we should be grateful for, since the sun is a nuclear reactor and we are warming our hands at an impossibly dangerous hearth. Even at 93 million miles away, it can fry our skin in half an hour, give us cancers and ravage our crops.

Every second, the sun converts 500 million tonnes of hydrogen into helium, a reaction that releases prodigious quantities of energy. That energy is the source of everything: you, me, Uncle Ray and the Christmas turkey.

All of which, as I’m sure we agree, is fascinating, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with Christmas. Except, of course, that the date of December 25 is the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice and a pagan festival of sun worship on to which date Christianity attached itself like a pilot fish to a reef shark.

For almost all human cultures over the millennia have made a god of the sun in one way or another, have personified it, worshipped it, held festivals in its honour, offered sacrifices to it, animal sacrifices, human sacrifices, anything to keep it rising and setting and generally behaving itself.

I have just discovered there is such as thing as a solar cycle.

Towards the end of it, the surface of the sun becomes more active and prone to flares such as the one we didn’t just notice. But then, suddenly, every 10.7 years, the magnetic polarity of the sun flips 180 degrees, the solar surface calms down and the cycle begins again.

Throughout the whole of human history, that solar cycle has remained stable. Why, nobody knows. Who is to say that the religious rituals haven’t worked, that the thousands of years of worship devoted to Ra, Sol, Helios and so on aren’t the cause of that stability?

So if, in the run-up to Christmas, you’re wondering whether the whole moth-eaten shebang of Santa, Jingle Bells and ho, ho, ho is worth the trouble, you might pause to reflect that dear old Auntie Violet’s bath salts, year on year, may actually be holding the cosmos together.