As points of religious contention go, the current status of the Temple Mount is one of the most potentially explosive issues for competing faiths anywhere in the world.

For Jews, it is the holiest place on Earth, from where the world was created, the site of the Binding of Isaac and the location of the First and Second Temples.

For Muslims too, al-Haram al-Sharif (noble sanctuary), has become a crucial place of worship and pilgrimage, where there stands a monumental shrine – the Dome of the Rock – and the al-Aqsa Mosque, a site of great importance in Islam.

This reality, combined with the Temple Mount’s physical location at the heart of contested territory, has given it a unique geopolitical combustibility not to be found anywhere else on the planet.

Ariel Sharon’s visit to the site in September 2000 prompted large-scale riots that eventually escalated into what became the second Palestinian intifada.

In 1969, a fire started in the al-Aqsa mosque by a mentally unstable Christian evangelical from Australia caused extensive damage and led to mass demonstrations in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. The event was also one of the motivating factors in the creation in 1969 of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an international body devoted to safeguarding Muslim interests.

But inter-religious and political concerns aside, there is another, less prominent but nevertheless bitter dispute currently being waged, this one between different Orthodox Jewish groups regarding the permissibility of going up to Judaism’s holiest site.

The divisions among different rabbinic leaders are sharp; some outlaw ascent to the Temple Mount in absolute terms on pain of spiritual excommunication; others see the refusal to go up and insist on the Jewish right to pray at the site as a deviation from Torah law.

And although access for Jewish Israelis (and foreign tourists) is currently subject to tightly restricted, time-limited slots, this has not impeded the prosecution of a tough war of words and a struggle over the contested battleground of what is and is not permitted according to Jewish law.

FOLLOWING Israel’s conquest of east Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli government allowed a Jordanian Islamic Wakf (religious trust), which had traditionally administered the Temple Mount complex, to continue to do so, despite the historical and religious importance of the site in Judaism.

Additionally, current Israeli law stipulates that Jews and other non-Muslims may not pray on the Temple Mount because of tensions this may cause, and supervisors from the Wakf follow visiting groups to ensure that they do not pray or conduct any visible form of worship But despite these restrictions, there is a small, committed contingent of devout Jews who visit the Temple Mount regularly, deny that doing so is not permissible under Jewish law and campaign actively for Jews to visit in greater numbers.

It is a widely held belief that Jews today are forbidden from going to the site of the Temple because of ritual impurity caused by contact with the dead.

Should someone contract this status – and it is hard to avoid – Jewish law prohibits entry to certain parts of the Temple Mount on pain of spiritual excommunication.

The religious establishment, principally the Chief Rabbinate, is keen to reinforce this notion. In April, for the second time in two months, the Chief Rabbinate issued a notice reiterating the stance of chief rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger, as well as numerous other senior rabbinical figures such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, that it is completely forbidden according to Jewish law to visit the Temple Mount.

But for many others, the ban is an affront to their religious sensibilities. Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute is one such person who fervently and passionately believes not only in the permissibility of ascending to the Temple Mount but that there is an obligation to do so, and to pray there.

“This is the holiest place in the world and the only true holy site in Judaism,” Richman told The Jerusalem Post. “We have a natural, healthy desire to be seen by God on the Temple Mount, and there is something very, very, wrong with rabbis who want to cauterize the natural well-spring of feeling and dedication Jews have for this place.”

Politicians from the Israeli Right are also eager to assert Jewish rights to and sovereignty over the Temple Mount. National Union MKs Arye Eldad and Uri Ariel visited the Temple Mount in December and Likud MK Danny Danon, who has also visited in recent times, is another advocate of Jewish rights at the site.

“The time has come for the government to exercise its sovereignty over the holiest spot in the Jewish religion,” Ariel said after his recent visit.

According to Richman and other notable rabbis, both past and present, concerns about stepping in the wrong place on the Temple Mount are unfounded.

Maimonides, for example, is known to have gone up to the Temple Mount in 1166 during a pilgrimage he made from Egypt to Israel. He wrote a brief letter about his experience, vowing to commemorate the date, the sixth of the Jewish month of Cheshvan, as a special holiday.

Richman cites David Ben-Zimra, a 15th-century rabbi from Spain who lived intermittently in Safed, Jerusalem, Fez and Cairo, and who wrote a responsa detailing the site of the Holy of Holies, which is strictly off-limits halachically, as well as areas where he said that it is permissible to visit. Moshe Feinstein as well, one of the most respected arbiters of Jewish law in the last 60 years, wrote of an “established tradition from the earliest sages, that it is permitted to visit [the site].”

There are also various historical sources that illustrate how Jews were accustomed to go up to the Temple Mount following the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. One of the most famous such sources is a recounting in the Talmud of a story that occurred after the destruction, when several of the most prominent sages of the time, including Rabbi Akiva, went up to the Temple Mount. All of them began to cry over the ruins, the Talmud relates, when they saw a fox running over the Holy of Holies, but Rabbi Akiva laughed, seeing in the experience the fulfillment of one prophecy and thereby expecting the future of fulfillment of the Temple’s restoration.

Other historical accounts also testify to Jews visiting the site, and even the presence of a synagogue in the early Muslim era until the 11th century.

SO IF the historic evidence is so compelling why is the rabbinate so adamant that Jews must not visit the Temple Mount? The rabbi of the Western Wall complex, Shmuel Rabinovitch, who has endorsed the ban on visiting the site, says that despite the opinions and historical evidence cited by those in favor, many of today’s leading and most authoritative Torah scholars nevertheless continue to prohibit such activity.

He told the Post that Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the most respected authority on Jewish law today, personally spoke with him about the importance of doing everything possible to prevent Jews from setting foot on the site.

“Does Rabbi Elyashiv not know the [opinions of] Rambam [Maimonides], the Radbaz [David Ben Zimra] and these other arguments?” he asked rhetorically.

“Did [the late] Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Aurbach, who also prohibited it, not know them?” Rabinovitch continued, proceeding to reel off a long list of other prominent scholars all banning Jews from visiting the Temple Mount.

Rabinovtich himself is reluctant to enter into the specific laws, details and debates surrounding the issue, sufficing to rely on the rulings of the abovementioned rabbis instead of listening to what he would consider less authoritative opinions.

But Rabbi Ratzon Arusi, municipal rabbi of Kiryat Ono and member of the Council of the Chief Rabbinate, expounds to a slightly greater extent. Yes, he acknowledges, Maimonides did ascend to the Temple Mount, as did others. The reason behind the rabbinate’s ban he says, is because, despite the fact that there are some areas of the Temple Mount where we know it is possible to visit, issuing a blanket permit for Jews to ascend would be very problematic.

As even Rabbi Richman and others concede, it requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to know where one halachically may and may not go on the Temple Mount. Coupled with this are numerous other restrictions and requirements, including the necessity of immersing in a mikve [ritual bath], not wearing leather shoes and other conditions.

Most people, Arusi says, are not familiar with these issues, and may anyway disregard them. The consequences in Jewish law for stepping in the wrong spot, spiritual excommunication – one of the gravest punishments applicable to transgressions such as failing to be circumcised – is too great to risk, he argues.

OUTSIDE of a religious desire to visit and pray on the Temple Mount is another driving factor for those who are so insistent on Jewish access to the site.

MK Arye Eldad of the National Union sees not only religious significance in the Temple Mount, but cultural and political importance as well. The failure of Jews to maintain their connection with the place, he says, undermines Israel’s political claim to it as well. In addition, he continues, it bolsters Muslim and Arab claims to the site, and denials that any Jewish Temple ever stood there.

“There is most definitely a political struggle going on here,” says Eldad. “The Arabs think that if they can succeed in prizing away this piece of property from the Jews, then they will be able to seize every other Jewish property here, whether it’s territorial, historical, cultural or religious.”

Richman concurs.

“Efforts are being waged by the forces of Islam to delegitimize the Jewish connection to Israel and Jerusalem. And on the Temple Mount in particular, they are trying to remove all vestiges of Jewish history,” he says. “We need to go to show we’re still connected and that it’s still ours. Unfortunately, the Diaspora experience has lobotomized the ‘body of Israel’ and has created an idiosyncratic self-defense mechanism which has denuded Judaism of its true spiritual essence.”

There is also something Messianic in the efforts of those who ardently seek to restore a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount. The Temple Institute has devoted huge sums of money into constructing and producing the vessels, implements and garments required for the Temple, using the exact instructions set out in the Torah. Among the vessels constructed is a fully working golden menorah, which cost $2 million and is ready for use in the Temple.

Yisrael Ariel, the founder and director of the Temple Institute, who was among the soldiers who conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, certainly felt at the time that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount was a harbinger of the very imminent arrival of the Messiah.

Dr. Motti Inbari, an expert in Jewish fundamentalism at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, cites an interview with Ariel in his book, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount. In the interview, conducted in the Or Hozer journal of yeshiva high schools, Ariel vividly describes his emotions and experiences upon the capture of the Temple Mount and states that he thought that “these are the days of the Messiah.”

Rabbi Richman and the institute insist that the Temple will not “descend from the heavens,” as some believe, but will have to be constructed by men here on earth, as evidenced by their efforts to reconstruct the Temple vessels.

Asked if it is time to re-build the Temple, he responds “We’re 2,000 years late in doing so.”

To those who say that now is not the right time, or that the Jewish people must work on themselves spiritually and socially before even beginning to think about such an endeavor, Richman retorts, “maybe it’s not the right time to put on tefillin? Who says there is a time limitation for the mitzva of building the Temple? It is our job to do all the mitzvot.” He insists, however, that it is not the intention of the institute to start rolling out the tape measure on the Temple Mount and start building.

Other groups, such as the Temple Mount Faithful, led by Gershon Salomon, are clearer about their ultimate goals. This organization says unabashedly that its goals include “the building of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in our lifetime in accordance with the Word of God and all the Hebrew prophets” as well as “the liberation of the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation.”

The homepage of the Temple Institute website currently bears a line from the well-known movie Field of Dreams: “if you build it, he will come.” The longterm goal, as stated on the website, is to do “all in our limited power to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time.”

Journalist and author Gershom Gorenberg, who wrote The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, sees a strong nexus between Jewish messianism and aspirations for the Temple Mount.

“The place has always elicited strong messianic symbolism and exerted a magnetic attraction for anyone awaiting the Messiah,” he told the Post. “For those who find it unbearable that we haven’t rebuilt the temple, there is an urge to bring about a redemption by human means, forcing God’s hand, as it were.”

For those opposed to increased Jewish activity at the Temple Mount, Gorenberg continues, although it’s generally wrapped in technical objections of a political or halachic nature, the subtext is that rebuilding the Temple is beyond the ability of human hands and effort and must await the arrival of the Messiah.

“In Jewish history, people who were certain they knew how to bring the Messiah ended up being disastrous for the Jewish people,” he concludes.

Regardless of the longer-term aspirations of the various groups, the current debate surrounding whether or not Jews can and should visit and pray at the Temple Mount will continue because of the activities of organizations like the Temple Institute.

According to the Chief Rabbinate, the reason they have recently re-iterated their ban on Jews going to the site is because of increased organized visitations, a growing phenomenon that it would like to stamp out.

But the political and spiritual desire among some who want to insist on their right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site is still very much alive. The nature of that desire highlights both the very deep-seated Jewish attachment to this revered place and the huge potential it has to spark intra-religious dispute along with political conflict.

A new museum in Tel Aviv – the Beit David Museum, dedicated to the House of David – offers two fun-filled free days honoring the holiday of Shavuot, which is also celebrated as the 3,025^th birthday of greatest Jewish king ever.

The twin-day treat will take place on Monday, 21.5, and Tuesday, 22.5. It will include a lecture at 7:00 p.m. Monday by Dr. Chaim Luria on genealogy and King David’s DNA, and events for children starting at 11:00 a.m. on the following day. These will include actors dressed as biblical characters who will teach the children about King David in a fun way.

The museum, located on 5 Brenner St. in central Tel Aviv, opened just four months ago. It contains archeological exhibits from First and Second Temple times and includes artifacts of special significance in the story of King David: for instance, one section displays slingshot stones found in the Emek HaEla region, where David killed Goliath with a single accurate stone to the head.

In another room, a video shows the life of King David, from his humble beginning as a lonely shepherd until his anointment as king. Another video explains the art of lyre-making, and based on writings that describe how King David built the lyres he played.

The museum prides itself on the Genealogy Center, a database that traces the descendants of King David to this very day. It is centered on Rashi, a famous descendant of David, and his progeny. It includes over 100 surnames of present-day families descended from the greatest king of all. The results of the research are presented in the museum and can be accessed through a special website. 

Susan Roth, founder of the King David Museum and the Genealogy Center, is herself a direct descendant of King David.

British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus.

By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs – as a whole – produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually.

They suggest the gas could have been a key factor in the warm climate 150 million years ago.

David Wilkinson from Liverpool John Moore’s University, and colleagues from the University of London and the University of Glasgow published their results in the journal Current Biology.

Sauropods, such as Apatosaurus louise (formerly known as Brontosaurus), were super-sized land animals that grazed on vegetation during the Mesozoic Era.

For Dr Wilkinson, it was not the giants that were of interest but the microscopic organisms living inside them.

“The ecology of microbes and their role in the working of our planet are one of my key interests in science,” he told BBC Nature.

“Although it’s the dinosaur element that captures the popular imagination with this work, actually it is the microbes living in the dinosaurs guts that are making the methane.”

Methane is known as a “greenhouse gas” that absorbs infrared radiation from the sun, trapping it in the Earth’s atmosphere and leading to increased temperatures.

Previous studies have suggested that the Earth was up to 10C (18F) warmer in the Mesozoic Era.

With the knowledge that livestock emissions currently contribute a significant part to global methane levels, the researchers used existing data to estimate how sauropods could have affected the climate.

Their calculations considered the dinosaurs’ estimated total population and used a scale that links biomass to methane output for cattle.

“Cows today produce something like 50-100 [million tonnes] per year. Our best estimate for Sauropods is around 520 [million tonnes],” said Dr Wilkinson.

Current methane emissions amount to around 500 million tonnes a year from a combination of natural sources, such as wild animals, and human activities including dairy and meat production.

Expressing his surprise at the comparative figures, Dr Wilkinson added that dinosaurs were not the sole producers of methane at the time.

“There were other sources of methane in the Mesozoic so total methane level would probably have been much higher than now,” he said.

Egypt’s Islamists aim to install a global Islamic caliphate with its capital in Jerusalem, a radical Muslim preacher told thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in a clip released Monday.

“We can see how the dream of the Islamic caliphate is being realized, God willing, by Dr. Mohamed Mursi,” Safwat Higazi told thousands of Brotherhood supporters at a Cairo soccer stadium as Mursi – the movement’s presidential candidate – and other Brotherhood officials nodded in agreement.

“The capital of the caliphate – the capital of the United States of the Arabs – will be Jerusalem, God willing,” Higazi said. “Our capital shall not be in Cairo, Mecca or Medina,” he said, before leading the crowd in chants of “Millions of martyrs march toward Jerusalem.”

Higazi is an unaffiliated Islamist who is barred from the United Kingdom for making statements endorsing terror attacks against Israelis. The clip, from Egypt’s Islamist-oriented Al-Nas television station, was aired last week and uploaded to YouTube on Monday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Members of the crowd carried banners emblazoned with slogans related to next week’s “Nakba Day,” when Palestinians and other Arabs mourn Israel’s creation in 1948.

“Tomorrow, Mursi will liberate Gaza,” an unidentified man cheers in the video before leading the crowd in chants of “Allah Akbar.”

“Banish the sleep from the eyes of all Jews,” the man repeats, accompanied by drumming. “Come on, you lovers of martyrdom, you are all Hamas… Forget about the whole world, forget about conferences. Brandish your weapons, say your prayers and pray to the Lord.”

Returning to the stage, Mursi vowed to pray in Jerusalem. “Yes, Jerusalem is our goal. We shall pray in Jerusalem, or die as martyrs on its threshold.”

Raymond Stock, an American translator and academic who spent two decades in Egypt, said the clip should come as a surprise to no one.

“This is what the Muslim Brotherhood really stands for: the extermination of Israel – and Jews everywhere – as well as the spread and control of radical Islam over the world,” he told The Jerusalem Post.

“How anyone can fail to see this boggles the mind – yet its denial is virtual dogma in the global mainstream media, US government and Western academia today,” said Stock, who has translated a number of books by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.

The Brotherhood won about half of Egypt’s parliamentary seats, but its main candidate Khairat al-Shater was disqualified last month from running for president and Mursi has struggled to win wide support.

Hard-line Salafi Islamists were parliamentary elections’ biggest surprise, taking around 25% of seats.

Instead, the two front-runners are Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh – a former Brotherhood figure who has won the backing of a broad range of voters from liberals to Salafis – and Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister and Arab League chief.

A presidential election, which starts on May 23-24, will choose a replacement for Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in February last year.

Poll numbers released Monday by the state-run Al-Ahram Center show Moussa leading the field with 39%, followed by Abol Fotouh with 24%, former Mubarak premier Ahmed Shafiq with 17% and Mursi in fourth with just 7%.

Stock said Amr Moussa has a significant chance of replacing Mubarak.

“Many people want Islamist values but are afraid that Islamist control of the presidency in addition to parliament could be bad for tourism and foreign investment. Others simply like Moussa,” he said. “He is a radical nationalist with a pragmatic streak, and from a Western point of view is the best we can hope for now that Omar Suleiman has been excluded.”

“But we can’t rule out Mohamed Mursi yet – the Brotherhood machine is extremely formidable, and nearly everyone has underestimated them before,” he said, adding that “the Salafis remain wild cards, as ever.”

Two rare 3,000-year-old models of ancient shrines were among artifacts presented by an Israeli archaeologist on Tuesday as finds he said offered new support for the historical veracity of the Bible.

The archaeologist, Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University, is excavating a site known as Hirbet Qeiyafa, located in the Judean hills not far from the modern-day city of Beit Shemesh.

Garfinkel says the central finds presented Tuesday at a Jerusalem press conference — two model shrines, one of clay and one of stone — echo elements of Temple architecture as described in the Bible and strengthen his claim that the city that stood at the site 3,000 years ago was inhabited by Israelites and was part of the kingdom ruled from Jerusalem by the biblical King David.

Since Qeiyafa was first unveiled in 2008, it has become considered one of the most important ongoing excavations in the world of biblical archaeology. Garfinkel says the existence of a fortified city at the site around 1,000 BCE supports the idea that a centralized kingdom existed around that time, as described in the Bible.

Archaeologists are split over whether King David was a historical figure, a point of dispute that reflects a broader debate over whether the Bible is an accurate record of events. Some scholars believe the text is just that, while others believe it is largely mythical, based perhaps on fragments of fact.

Garfinkel is firmly in the former camp, and sees his finds at the site as supporting the idea that the Bible’s account is factually based.

“There is an argument here that is bigger than the dating of any one site,” Garfinkel said at the press conference. “In essence, the whole Bible is being judged.”

Model shrines of the type found at the site would have been used in ritual practice. One of the models, 8 inches high, is made of clay, and includes a main door and two pillars as well as decorative elements like two lions on the doorstep and three birds perched on the roof. Garfinkel suggested the pillars were suggestive of the ones known as Boaz and Yachin, which the Bible says existed in Solomon’s Temple.

The other shrine, made of limestone and standing 14 inches high, includes stylized roof beams and a recessed doorway, which Garfinkel said could help settle disputes about how best to translate some of the  Hebrew words used in the Bible to describe architectural elements of the Temple.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Qeiyafa finds, he said, is not what has been found but what has not: The diggers have found none of the cultic figurines of animals or people common at other sites, he said, suggesting residents followed a prohibition against idol worship. And the archaeologists at the site have found thousands of bones of sheep, goats and cattle, but none of pigs, suggesting they followed a dietary prohibition on swine.

“The people at the site obeyed two biblical commandments — they didn’t eat pig, and they didn’t make graven images,” he said. This, he said, supported his view that the site was a fortified Israelite city.

The fortified nature of the settlement at Qeiyafa is important because members of the “minimalist” school in biblical archaeology, who claim there was no organized kingdom in Judea at the time David was supposed to have existed, have based that conclusion in part on an absence of fortified cities at the time. Building such cities requires centralized administration.

Qeiyafa would seem to show that such cities in fact existed, meaning that there could well have been a centralized kingdom like the one described in the Bible.

Other scholars have urged caution in reaching conclusions based on the findings from Qeiyafa.

Model shrines of the type presented Tuesday have been found at many other sites belonging to other local cultures, and their similarity to Temple architecture as described in the Bible has already been noted, said Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, who leads a dig at the ruins of the nearby Philistine city of Gath. And the existence of lions and birds on the clay model undermine the claim that no figures of people or animals have been found at Qeiyafa, he said.

Qeiyafa indeed appears to have been inhabited by Israelites, Maeir said, but the cultural lines among the various peoples of the Land of Israel at that time, he said, were “fuzzier than the way they are often described.”

The new finds do not prove conclusively who residents were or provide dramatic new evidence for any side in the ongoing dispute among biblical archaeologists, he said.

“There’s no question that this is a very important site, but what exactly it was — there is still disagreement about that,” Maeir said.

The ruins at Hirbet Qeiyafa were first noticed in 2003 by Saar Ganor, a ranger with the Israeli Antiquities Authority. He contacted Garfinkel, and digging began in 2007.

The next year, Garfinkel unveiled the first dramatic find from the site – a ceramic shard that some scholars believe contains the oldest example of Hebrew ever found. He suggested the writing supported the case for the Bible’s accuracy, because it meant that 3,000 years ago the Israelites could record events and transmit the history that was compiled as the Bible several hundred years later.

The excavation has uncovered a city eight acres in area with two monumental gates and a wall running 770 yards in circumference.

Carbon dating of olive pits found at the site show it was active between 1020 and 980 BCE, according to the archaeologists.

Mike Hapgood, who studies solar events, says the world isn’t prepared for a truly damaging storm. And one could happen soon.

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt.

This isn’t the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before — and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England.

Much of the planet’s electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms. But the world is still not prepared for a truly damaging solar storm, Hapgood argues in a recent commentary published in the journal Nature.

Hapgood talked with The Times about the potential effects of such a storm and how the world should prepare for it.

What exactly is a solar storm?

I find that’s hard to answer. The term “solar storm” has crept into our usage, but nobody has defined what it means. Whether a “solar storm” is happening on the sun or is referring to the effect on the Earth depends on who’s talking.

I prefer “space weather,” because it focuses our attention on the phenomena in space that travel from the sun to the Earth.

People often talk about solar flares and solar storms in the same breath. What’s the difference?

Solar flares mainly emit X-rays — we also get radio waves from these things, and white light in the brightest of flares. They all travel at the same speed as light, so it takes eight minutes to arrive. There are some effects from flares, such as radio interference from the radio bursts.

But that’s a pretty small-beer thing. The big thing is the geomagnetic storms [on Earth] that affect the power grid, and that’s caused by the coronal mass ejections [from the sun].

Coronal mass ejections are caused when the magnetic field in the sun’s atmosphere gets disrupted and then the plasma, the sun’s hot ionized gas, erupts and send charged particles into space. Think of it like a hurricane — is it headed toward us or not headed toward us? If we’re lucky, it misses us.

How are solar flares and coronal mass ejections related?

There’s an association between flares and coronal mass ejections, but it’s a relationship we don’t quite understand scientifically. Sometimes the CME launches before the flare occurs, and vice versa.

What happens when those particles reach Earth?

There can be a whole range of effects. The classic one everyone quotes is the effect on the power grid. A big geomagnetic storm can essentially put extra electric currents into the grid. If it gets bad enough, you can have a complete failure of the power grid — it happened in Quebec back in 1989. If you’ve got that, then you’ve just got to get it back on again. But you could also damage the transformers, which would make it much harder to get the electric power back.

How else could people be affected?

You get big disturbances in the Earth’s upper atmosphere — what we call the ionosphere — and that could be very disruptive to things like GPS [the network of global positioning system satellites]. Given the extent we use GPS in everyday life [including for cellphone networks, shipping safety and financial transaction records], that’s a big issue.

The storms can also disrupt communications on transoceanic flights. Sometimes when that happens, they will either divert or cancel flights. So that would be the like the disruption we had in Europe from the volcano two years ago, where they had to close down airspace for safety reasons.

What went wrong in the 1989 storm?

In the U.K., there were two damaged transformers that had to be repaired. But no power cuts. The worst thing is what happened in Quebec. In Quebec, the power system went from normal operation to failure in 90 seconds. It  affected around 6 million people. The impact was reckoned to be $2 billion Canadian in 1989 prices.

We had lots of disruption to communications to spacecraft operations. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has big radars tracking everything in space, and as they describe it, they lost 1,600 space objects. They found them again, but for a few days they didn’t know where they were.

Is that the biggest geomagnetic storm on record?

We always describe the storm in 1859 as the biggest space weather event. We know there were huge impacts on the telegraph, which suggests there would be similarly severe impacts on modern power grids. It’s hard to compare it to the 1989 event because of the changes in our technology.

Many systems have been built to withstand a storm as big as the 1989 event. Is that good enough?

A serious concern would be whole regions losing electrical power for some significant time. Here in the U.K., the official assessment is that we could lose one or two regions where the power might be out for several months.

What would the consequences be?

In the modern world, we use electricity for so many things. We require electrical power to pump water into people’s houses and to pump the sewage away. [You can imagine] what could happen if the sewage systems aren’t pumping stuff away.

If you don’t have power, you can’t pump fuel into vehicles. If you don’t have any fuel, traffic could come to a standstill.

Could the economy function?

Most of the time you’re using credit cards, debit cards or you’ll be getting money out of an ATM. If you’ve lost the power, the computers in the bank that keep track of our money will have back-up power, but not the ATMs or the machines in the shops. So if you had a big power outage, it wouldn’t be long before we’d be trying to find cash.

What are the chances that something like this will happen soon?

A recent paper [published in February in the journal Space Weather] tried to estimate the chance of having a repeat of 1859 and came up with a value of a 12% chance of it happening in the next 10 years. That’s quite a high risk.

What can be done?

The biggest step is to make more and more people aware of the issue, so they’re thinking about it in the way they design things. That’s the most critical part.

I think it’s also getting a better picture of these very violent past events. We’d like to find out more about the scope of those events. We have a lot of old data from past events that’s on paper — in newspapers and so on — and we’re busy trying to find ways to turn it into digital.

We had a recent flare-up of publicity in March thanks to a solar storm that didn’t really amount to much. Is this sort of coverage a good thing or a bad thing?

It makes such a good scare story, and it’s entertaining. It was a mildly interesting event, certainly, but not at all big-league stuff. It makes people think, “Oh it’s nothing really,” so experts like myself are in danger of being in the crying-wolf situation. That’s something that is a concern to me, personally.

Johns Hopkins is again at the center of groundbreaking research. One of their astronomers had a simple idea, and as Mike Schuh reports, it led to a once in a lifetime discovery about black holes.

Black holes are out there sucking up stars like cosmic vacuum cleaners. But they’re invisible. We’ve never seen them work in real time… until now. A Hopkins-led team found a star caught by a black hole’s gravity.

“And when it got really close, the gravitational force of the black hole literally ripped it apart, stretched it into a thin stream,” Dr. Suvi Gezari, a Hopkins astronomer, said.

Two telescopes scanned hundreds of thousands of galaxies.

“So these two telescopes are scanning the sky, waiting for something interesting to happen,” Gezari said.

And it did. The light and energy that reached their instruments was created 2 billion years ago when the only living things on earth were microbes.

“These two telescopes discovered this extremely luminous flare from the center of the galaxy,” Gezari explained.

They translated that data into an animation showing a star being sucked into a black hole, some of it spit out at the other end of it at 20 million miles an hour.

“For the star to be actually destroyed by the black hole, it had to get really, really close to the black hole,” Gezari said. “It had to get as close as the distance between the sun and mercury. So people are always scared of black holes but in fact, unless you get really close to them, nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

Sometimes in astronomy, the trick is knowing where to look. The work by this team should enable future discoveries.

This summer, Gezari will leave Hopkins to become a professor at the University of Maryland College Park.