By Chethana Janith, Jadetimes News
This may be the game changer we’ve been waiting for in space weather forecasting.
Solar storms, at least, exceptionally strong ones-have the potential to wreak havoc on the technology that runs our everyday lives if they strike our atmosphere straight on.
As a result, there’s a huge amount of research being dedicated to predicting when these storms could hit in order to give us time to prepare.
A research team has recently announced that they have found a way to predict how fast a particular kind of solar storm will be moving before it even fully emerges from the Sun.
In today’s day and age, pretty much everything we do requires power. From chatting on our phones and navigating with GPS to lighting and climate controlling our homes, we need power to function as a modern society.
That’s why, if you ask an astronomer to name the top few existential threats to human life as we know it, a coronal mass ejection (CME) is probably on that list. CMEs are a type of solar storm, and they are basically huge eruptions of plasma, gas, and charged particles that shoot out from the surface of the Sun.
If one of those hits our planet, it can cause a geomagnetic storm (a disruption of our magnetic field) that could knock out our entire power grid, our whole satellite network, everything, a strong-enough solar storm could “send us back to the stone age.”
Now, those astronomers are not going to tell you that a situation like this is likely or imminent. A world-stopping geomagnetic storm like that could only result from a solar storm that was both pointed directly at Earth and of significant and abnormal strength. That’s only happened once in written history (though, there is evidence of even larger storms scattered throughout the geologic record). We call it the Carrington event, and it occurred in 1859.
But it is possible. After all, there’s no objective reason that the Carrington event happened in the 1800s instead of now. Just luck of the gas-powered draw. So, with the potential of an event like that hanging our collective heads, it makes sense that scientists would want a warning system in place. If we get enough heads-up, we could theoretically avert a fair amount of the stone age scenario.
For a long time, that’s been easier said than done. The Sun is a turbulent place, and it’s long been extremely difficult to predict exactly what it’s going to do. But recently, a group of scientists has announced (and explained via a presentation at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting) that they may be able to predict when a geomagnetic storm could be on its way.
The whole method relies on the idea of “critical height,” which the team explains in a press release to be the height at which a stretched magnetic field becomes too weak to contain a CME. As a CME develops, if you were to look at it from the side (and with eyes that could see magnetic fields), you’d be able to watch as the Sun’s magnetic field swelled like a bubble and eventually “popped,” spilling plasma and charged particles out into space in an ever-widening arc.
According to the team behind this new research, the height of that “bubble” will determine how fast the resulting CME will move. “By measuring how the strength of the magnetic field decreases with height,” Harshita Gandhi, the lead researcher on the project, said in a press release, “we can determine this critical height. Our findings reveal a strong relationship between the critical height at CME onset and the true CME speed. This insight allows us to predict the CME’s speed and, consequently, its arrival time on Earth, even before the CME has fully erupted.”
If their method is as good as the researchers say it is, that means real predictive capabilities for at least some kinds of potentially harmful solar storms. The fastest CMEs arrive at Earth in about 15-18 hours, and knowing one is coming a full 15 hours before it hits could be the difference between a complete power-grid blowout and a brief pause in your air conditioner's capabilities as experts shut things down to prepare for the storm.
Likely, there’s still a lot more research to come on predicting solar storms. After all, the more prepared we can be for a solar storm, the better.
“Our research not only enhances our understanding of the Sun’s explosive behavior but also significantly improves our ability to forecast space weather events,” Gandhi said in a press release. “This means better preparation and protection for the technological systems we rely on every day.”
