NASA scientists can predict solar flares using THIS method, check how

Due to the Sun’s blazing upper atmosphere, a team of scientists have found a new solution which will help them in predicting when and where the Sun’s next flare might explode.

As per the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a solar flare is an intense burst of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. They are usually the bright areas in the sun which can last from minutes to hours. If powerful, they can be very dangerous for the power grid, satellites and even mobile phones.  

Solar flares are usually monitored using X-rays and optical light.

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What is the new method that researchers have come across?

With the help of data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), researchers from NorthWest Researchers Associates (NWRA) identified a small signal in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere, which is the corona. This helped them to identify the regions of the Sun which are more likely to produce solar flares.

What did the researchers find?

Using the data, the scientists were able to find the regions which were about to flare, which is the corona, which produced small-scale flashes- like small sparklers before the big one.

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How will this information help them?

With the help of this information, scientists will be able to improve predictions of flares and space weather storms – they have disrupted conditions in space caused due to the Sun’s activity.  

One should know that space weather can affect the Earth in many ways, such as: producing auroras, endangering astronauts, disrupting radio communication and even causing huge electrical blackouts, as per NASA.

Earlier scientists have studied how any activity in the lower layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, photosphere and chromosphere can show impending flare activity in active regions. These are marked by a group of sunspots or strong magnetic regions on the surface of the sun which is darker and cooler as compared to their surroundings.

The scientists for their research used a newly created image database of the Sun’s active regions which have been captured by SDO. This is a publicly available resource, which has been described in a companion paper and in The Astrophysical Journal.  

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