Activity on the sun affects Earth’s magnetic field. It can cause geomagnetic storms, the same events that create the beautiful aurorae, or northern and southern lights. Are these storms dangerous? Source: https://earthsky.org/space/are-solar-storms-dangerous-to-us…
Tag: space weather
Scientists measure the evolving energy of a solar flare’s explosive first minutes
Toward the end of 2017, a massive new region of magnetic field erupted on the Sun’s surface next to an existing sunspot. The powerful collision of magnetic energy produced a series of potent solar flares, causing turbulent space weather conditions at Earth. These were the first flares to be captured, in their moment-by-moment progression, by NJIT’s then recently opened Expanded Owens…
Could Spacecraft Catch the Solar Winds With ‘Electric Sails’?
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: For over a century, the “solar sail” has been a concept in theoretical spaceflight, in science fiction, and in the last few years, actual spaceflight. Recently, the Breakthrough Starshot project has been prompting and funding a lot of work to optimise and explore the operational possibilities of flying spacecraft to nearby stars, and this has produced…
Nightside barrier gently brakes ‘bursty’ plasma bubbles
The solar wind that pummels the Earth’s dayside magnetosphere causes turbulence, like air over a wing. Physicists at Rice University have developed new methods to characterize how that influences space weather on the nightside. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-12-nightside-barrier-gently-bursty-plasma.html…
Scientists see a new kind of explosion on the sun
A new kind of magnetic explosion, called forced magnetic reconnection, was seen for the first time in images from NASA’s SDO spacecraft. Learn more in this beautiful video. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/new-kind-of-explosion-on-sun-video…
‘We’re missing something fundamental about the sun’
Parker Solar Probe – now in its 4th orbit around our local star – is designed to endure the sun’s heat and radiation like no previous mission. Data collected during the craft’s first 2 orbits were released last month. This week, 4 new studies in Nature have space scientists buzzing. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/parker-solar-probe-4-new-studies-dec-4-2019…
Detecting solar flares, more in real time
Computers can learn to find solar flares and other events in vast streams of solar images and help NOAA forecasters issue timely alerts, according to a new study. The machine-learning technique, developed by scientists at CIRES and NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), searches massive amounts of satellite data to pick out features significant for space weather. Changing conditions on…
New model will help predict several solar phenomena
An international group of scientists, in cooperation with a research scientist from Skoltech, has developed a model to describe changes in solar plasma. This will help comprehend solar dynamics and gives clues to understanding how to predict space weather events. The results have been published in the Astrophysical Journal. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-solar-phenomena.html…
25 years of science in the solar wind
In the early 1980s, heliophysicists needed answers. They wanted to learn how to protect astronauts and assets around Earth from the potentially damaging space weather that results from our tumultuous sun. To do that, they needed to better understand the constantly changing, dynamic space system around our planet—including measurements of the properties of the solar wind, the constant billowing of charged…
NRL launches space weather instrument on NASA satellite
A U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) instrument aboard NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) satellite will deliver unprecedented information to help scientists investigate how both terrestrial and solar weather impact the ionosphere, the ionized region of Earth’s upper atmosphere. ICON launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Oct. 10. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-nrl-space-weather-instrument-nasa.html…