My Apollo

The big news this week in New Scientist (there's lots of big news in New Scientist, including the rapturous 'female ejaculation' article that had about 4 of us rubbing our chins for a good hour) is that it's been confirmed that the sun is sucking away oxygen from the atmosphere. Regarde-vous:

The Earth (capitlal 'cos it's definite article) and the Sun (same deal, different thing) have this crazy dance of magnetic fields that are always playing with eachother. The sun basically wants to eat our planet or at least knock it off it's orbit or at least erase all trace of life by flash-frying us with solar wind.

However, our little planet, our home-globe has an, essentially, iron core. This means we have a magnetic field. This magnetic field absorbs, deflects and bounces most of these solar flares so we can happily sit around on our arses watching Britain's Got Talent and not be turned into human steak and chips:

Now, don't jump up with excitement, waving your little UN flags around and getting all gaia-patriotic, because that beastly, nasty, violent wolf of a star has another little trick up it's sleeve. You see, the sun is mostly liquid, and due to the inertia of it spinning, the outside of the sun around the circumference spins faster than the core. Leading to this:

After about 10-11 years, the magnetic fields around the sun are so stretched and wound-up that they snap, and this happens:

It basically goes mental and throws loads of stuff at us. Like an horrific toddler, but made of nuclear explosions and near-impossible physics.

Anyway, our little magnetic field struggles somewhat at about this point and not all of the bitter rage that the sun sends flying in to space is deflected. In fact, most of it is sent to the north pole, along the magnetic fields, where it proceeds to ionise, eat oxygen and generally try and crash through the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons we have the northern lights, and more importantly, the hole in the ozone layer.

It's estimated that the sun eats about 60,000 tons of oxygen from the atmosphere each year, and up until now that was just fine because it was all put back by trees and stuff like that. But nasty Britain's Got Talent watching lazy potential pommes frites used the trees to make into shoes and sweets and stuff so the oxygen the sun eats up doesn't go back.

Aw. You horrible people.

The only solution of course, and we all know this, is to breathe less and stop ITV from producing and broadcasting absolute pap to the world. If we all do a little less breathing, and a little less gloating at people we don't know, I think we can save the planet. GO TEAM!