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Intense solar flares—sudden bursts of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun—can shoot out dangerous levels of energy strong enough to reach Earth’s atmosphere. Predicting solar flares, however, is not as simple as predicting a sunny day.
A team of researchers co-led by heliophysicist Emily Mason of Predictive Sciences Inc. identified a type of solar activity in the Sun’s atmosphere that could precede and thus signal future solar flares. His research, detailed in a December 6 to study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented on January 15 during the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, has important implications in the effort to keep astronauts and space assets safe.
Indeed, predicting solar flares is crucial for the protection of people and technology from the volatile explosions of the Sun. Solar flares can disrupt satellite communications, GPS systems and power grids on Earth, while also exposing astronauts and spacecraft to dangerous levels of radiation. A reliable early warning system would therefore be a welcome tool to mitigate the dangers of space weather.
Using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, Mason and his colleagues analyzed the wobble of the coronal loops—bow-like structures in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona—in the process of 50 intense solar flares. Coronal loops exist in the same magnetically active regions of the Sun that also give rise to solar flares, according to a NASA statement. The researchers observed that the brightness of coronal loops in extreme ultraviolet light varied much more in the hours preceding a large nearby flare than coronal loops over non-flaring regions.
“We found that some of the extreme ultraviolet light above active regions flares up erratically for a few hours before a solar flare,” Mason explained in the statement. “The results are really important for understanding flares and can improve our ability to predict dangerous space weather.”
The researchers suggest that observing the variations in ultraviolet brightness in the coronal loops can predict future solar flares two to six hours in advance with an accuracy of 60 to 80 percent, which, if proven true, is more accurate than the previously proven forecasting methods.
“The Sun’s corona is a dynamic environment, and each solar flare is like a snowflake — each flare is unique,” said Kara Kniezewski of the Air Force Institute of Technology, who also co – led the study. “We find that looking for periods of ‘chaotic’ behavior in the coronal cycle emission, rather than specific trends, provides a much more consistent metric.”
Vadim Uritsky of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who also participated in the study, plans to create a “well-tested and ideally simpler indicator (solar flare) ready for the jump from research to operations” . The researchers also suggest that the stronger the flare, the earlier the peaks sparkle, but they admit that more analysis is needed to confirm this possible aspect.
Scientists have been trying to predict solar flares for decades. If the recent study proves true, the quivering coronal loops could essentially function as a flashing warning signal for people and technology in harm’s way.
