Latest Solar flare Stories
ESA's Proba-2 small Sun-watcher was among the flotilla of satellites on watch as the Sun erupted spectacularly this week.After years of relative quietness, the Sun is waking up. Tuesday 7 June saw a medium-class M2.5 solar flare, associated with a proton storm, a coronal mass ejection that glanced past Earth on Thursday 9 June and an accompanying burst of radio energy.ESA's Proba-2 satellite was launched in November 2009, during the most inactive period of the solar cycle, but now the Sun is...
Experts said a U.N. plan to upgrade "space weather" forecasts can help the world cope with solar storms that might rack up to $2 trillion in damages if the sun repeated a giant flare of 1859. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the sun is entering a more active phase due to peak in 2013 on about 11-year sunspot cycle. Power supplies, air traffic control, communications and satellites can all be disrupted by storms. "We are increasingly being impacted by space...
A NASA space observatory witnessed an unusual solar flare on Tuesday that could cause interference to satellites, communications and power on Earth in the next few days, officials warn.Not since 2006 has an eruption of this magnitude been seen reports the National Weather Service.A statement by NASA's solar dynamics observatory says, "The sun unleashed an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare with a substantial coronal mass ejection (CME) on June 7 that is visually spectacular.""The large cloud of...
WASHINGTON, May 11, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The famous Crab Nebula supernova remnant has erupted in an enormous flare five times more powerful than any flare previously seen from the object. On April 12, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope first detected the outburst, which lasted six days. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The nebula is the wreckage of an exploded star that emitted light which reached Earth in the year 1054. It is located 6,500...
Karen C. Fox, NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterWhether it's a giant solar flare or a beautiful green-blue aurora, just about everything interesting in space weather happens due to a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. Reconnection occurs when magnetic field lines cross and create a burst of energy. These bursts can be so big they're measured in megatons of TNT.Several spacecraft have already sent back tantalizing data when they happened to witness a magnetic reconnection event in...
Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire studied the largest solar flare recorded in nearly five years. The solar eruption in February was caused by five rotating sunspots working in concert, BBC News reports.Solar flares are eruptions on the surface of the sun which begin as concentrated magnetic fields and are visible as sunspots. As the magnetic fields build up, they twist and erupt, releasing vast amounts of heat, light and radiation."Twisting the Sun's magnetic field is like...
So great is the wealth of data about the Sun now being sent back by space missions such as SOHO, STEREO and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) that scientists back on Earth can struggle to keep pace. To combat this data overload, scientists from the Visual Computer Centre at Bradford University are developing advanced imaging tools to help scientists visualize what's happening at the Sun, make sense of the data and predict the extreme solar activities that could affect our life here on...
Our Sun experiences regular eruptions of material into space, but solar physicists still have difficulty in explaining why these dramatic events take place. Now a group of scientists from the University of St Andrews think they have the answer: clouds of ionized gas (plasma) constrained by magnetic fields and known as 'plasmoids' that struggle to break free of the Sun's magnetic field. Dr Vasilis Archontis will present their work on Monday 18 April at the National Astronomy Meeting in...
By Dr. Tony Phillips - Science@NASAIf you've ever stood in front of a hot stove, watching a pot of water and waiting impatiently for it to boil, you know what it feels like to be a solar physicist.Back in 2008, the solar cycle plunged into the deepest minimum in nearly a century. Sunspots all but vanished, solar flares subsided, and the sun was eerily quiet."Ever since, we've been waiting for solar activity to pick up," says Richard Fisher, head of the Heliophysics Division at NASA...
The first calibrated measurements of solar irradiance made by the LYRA instrument on ESA's second PROBA (PRoject for On-Board Autonomy) satellite are now available to the scientific community. Future access to near-real-time data from both of the primary instruments on PROBA-2, SWAP and LYRA, is expected to provide new opportunities to study solar activity and space weather. The payload on PROBA-2 includes two complementary solar observation instruments, SWAP (Sun Watcher using Active pixel...
Latest Solar flare Reference Libraries
Photosphere -- The photosphere of an astronomical object is the region at which the optical depth becomes one. In other words, the photosphere is the place where an object stops being transparent. It is typically used to describe the Sun or another star. Because stars are large balls of gas, they have no solid surface. However, there is a depth at which the gas stops being transparent to photons, and this depth provides a visual surface to the star. The Sun's photosphere has a...
Corona -- The corona is the luminous "atmosphere" of the Sun extending millions of kilometers into space, most easily seen during a total solar eclipse. An interesting feature of the corona is the fact that it is much hotter than the visible "surface" of the Sun; the photosphere is approximately 6000°C compared to the corona at over one million °C. The corona is much less dense than the photosphere, however, and so produces less light. The exact mechanism by which the corona is...
Chromosphere -- The chromosphere (literally, "color sphere") is a thin layer of the Sun's atmosphere just above the photosphere, roughly 10,000 kilometers deep. The chromosphere is more visually transparent than the photosphere. The most common solar feature within the chromosphere are spicules, long thin fingers of luminous gas which appear like the blades of a huge field of fiery grass growing upwards from the photosphere below. Spicules rise to the top of the chromosphere and then sink...
Solar Wind -- Solar wind, a stream of particles (mostly high-energy protons ~ 500 Kev) that is continually ejected from the surface of the Sun. The composition of this plasma is identical to the Sun's corona, 73% hydrogen and 25% helium with the remainder as trace impurities, and is ionized. Near Earth, the velocity of the solar wind varies from 200km/s-889km/s. The average is 450 km/s. Approximately 3000 tons of material is lost from the Sun every hour as solar wind. Since solar...
Solar Maximum -- The Sun, a roiling ball of plasma, occupies its place in space approximately 93 million miles from Earth. Though it seems simple to inhabitants of this planet -- the Sun shines, giving light and heat -- the processes occurring in the Sun are so complex that many scientists devote their careers to just one aspect of solar activity. Changes in the activity of the Sun particularly engage solar scientists. Whether fluctuations in the solar magnetic field, expulsions of...
