Solar Storm

solar storms in space can be picked up by iOS and Android smartphones, meaning billions of people have a personal geomagnetic storm detector — but the signals threaten to interfere with future location-based applications. Hoping to get the public more involved in science, study author Sten F. Odenwald, an astronomer…

Home News Science & Astronomy An illustration of Earth's Van Allen belts, with the trajectories of ultra-relativistic electrons in gray. The colorful loops in the foreground are the orbits of satellites that must pass through this electromagnetically dangerous area of space. (Image: © Ingo Michaelis & Yuri Shprits, GFZ) In…

Solar storms strip a planet’s atmosphere over time, and only a strong magnetosphere would be able to provide maximum protection. Lunar samples gathered by NASA’s Apollo missions recently revealed that the Moon had its own global magnetosphere, lasting from about 4.25 to 2.5 billion years ago. According to new research,…

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are large expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the Sun’s corona. They can eject billions of tons of coronal material and carry an embedded magnetic field (frozen in flux) stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength. CMEs travel outward from the…

Solar storm analysis carried out by an army of citizen scientists has helped researchers devise a new and more accurate way of forecasting when Earth will be hit by harmful space weather. Scientists at the University of Reading added analysis carried out by members of the public to computer models…

Creepy sunspots seen by astronomers at the GREGOR telescope in Europe reveal our parent star in unprecedented detail. The images also show just how creepy sunspots can look. Studying magnetic patterns on the Sun allows researchers to better understand its behavior. Severe solar storms can affect satellites and electronic systems…

By Leah Crane The magnetic field of the sun’s corona has been mapped for the first timeYang et al. 2020The outermost layer of the sun, called the corona, is extraordinarily difficult to study, but now researchers have made the first map of its magnetic field. This will help us predict…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Extensive power outages and satellite blackouts that affect air travel and the internet are some of the potential consequences of massive solar storms. These storms are believed to be caused by the release of enormous amounts of stored magnetic energy due to changes in the magnetic…

Extensive power outages and satellite blackouts that affect air travel and the internet are some of the potential consequences of massive solar storms. These storms are believed to be caused by the release of enormous amounts of stored magnetic energy due to changes in the magnetic field of the sun's…

Join IEEE | IEEE.org | IEEE Xplore Digital Library | IEEE Standards | IEEE Spectrum | More Sites Create Account | Sign In Read More