Astro flare 3d
Kusano likens it to analyzing a snow-covered mountain slope to find the point that requires the least disturbance to trigger an avalanche. Next, they compare the amount of twist in the magnetic field to the strength of the overlying magnetic field to determine how much of a nudge the site needs to trigger a runway reconnection event. The model is based on satellite observations of the surface magnetic field, but extrapolated via simulations of the Sun's corona. To identify where a reconnection seems to be brewing, the team constructs a 3D computer model of the Sun's magnetic field over active sunspot regions. But if one does form, look out - all that energy becomes fuel for the flare as it rips outward and into the Solar System, like a thunderstorm feeding on energy in the atmosphere. A strong overlying field with a lot of magnetic energy tends to suppress such runaway reconnection events from starting.
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"The overlying magnetic field plays a double role," team leader Kanya Kusano of Nagoya University explained to Astronomy. Whether or not this happens depends partly on the conditions in the Sun's outer atmosphere - or corona - high above this site of reconnection. During this reconnection, the morphing magnetic field can release explosions of energy, like knotted rubber bands finally snapping. But if they get perturbed, the field lines of the two arcs can begin to merge, triggering a runaway process called magnetic reconnection.
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In static conditions, this is a stable configuration. They hypothesize that the most likely locations for flares to form are where two arcs of magnetic field lines are both close and roughly parallel to one another. To tackle the challenge of predicting solar flares, the Japanese team’s new technique identifies the seed of a flare by looking for the conditions that are most likely to trigger one. "But will it really make ? Will it make a big one? There it's getting more difficult" to predict, says Veronig. You might be able to identify that the conditions are right. But just like predicting thunderstorms doesn’t always pan out, predicting solar flares isn’t as straightforward as it seems. It's a bit like waking up to a hot, muggy, sunny day and knowing the conditions will be ripe for a thunderstorm to form. However, these methods are not informed by physics simulations, but rather various ways of quantifying how knotted a region of magnetic field appears in observations - an indication of how much flare-fueling energy is being stored. A study from last year that compared over a dozen forecasts from agencies around the world concluded that "one of the operational methods are exceptionally good." In fact, a few of them failed to consistently perform better than an algorithm that made random guesses. For this reason, many weather and space agencies across the globe produce forecasts of solar flares.īut predicting solar weather is still a work in progress. Such coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can threaten the infrastructure humans have built on and around Earth, like power grids and satellites. These active regions sometimes produce flares, or intense eruptions of energy and light, which can send charged particles and radiation surging through the Sun's outer atmosphere and through the solar system. These pretzels of magnetic field leave their mark in the form of sunspots - dark, slightly cooler patches on the Sun’s surface where the coiled magnetic energy suppresses sunlight. "It provides a very important foundation, and it brings a bit more physics into it than the other methods," says Astrid Veronig, a solar physicist at the University of Graz who was not part of the new research, but wrote a commentary accompanying the article's publication in Science on July 30.Īs the hot plasma of the Sun churns and roils, it twists our star's magnetic field into tighter and tighter configurations, storing energy like a knotted rubber band. Though the research is still in the proof-of-concept stage, the plan is to incorporate the model into real-time solar forecasts within the next couple of years - perhaps helping protect us from the next Carrington Event. Not only that, the technique can also pinpoint where the flare will erupt on the Sun, as well as roughly how powerful it will be. Now, a team of researchers in Japan have proposed a new, physics-based technique that can predict, in many cases, whether or not a solar flare is about to occur. Understanding when and why powerful solar flares erupt from the Sun's surface, often spewing out torpedoes of charged particles and plasma, is one of most difficult challenges in astrophysics.
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If you think predicting weather on Earth is hard, try predicting weather on the Sun. How do solar flares unfold - and can we predict them?