When solar flares erupt on the sun, they have the capability of taking down communications and power grids here on Earth. Scientists have long searched for ways of accurately predicting them so we could be better prepared when they strike.
Scientists from ETH Zurich created a new computer simulation to predict solar storms that could lead to better prediction in the future.
Solar flares release more than a million times more energy than that produced in volcanic eruptions. They send out mass from the outer part of the sun's atmosphere, which creates a corona. If that energy, called a coronal mass ejection, reaches earth, it can disrupt satellites, radio traffic and electrical plants.
This happened in 2003 and resulted in a communications and power failure in parts of Sweden.
The team wasn't looking specifically at solar flares when they created their model. The patterns of solar flares are statistically similar to a range of things, such as avalanches, earthquakes and even the stock market.
The team realized this by working from a theory that states that if the time between two solar explosions is short, the second flare will probably be stronger than the first. Working with this, the team worked with models and calculated the math, creating a computer simulation to estimate future solar flares.
Like earthquakes and the stock market, solar flares "interlock" until they reach a certain value before exploding. This means that the energy going into it does so in bursts. Scientists call this criticality.
"One example for this is a pile of sand being created by a trickle of sand grains. The pile continues to grow until, every now and then, an avalanche is triggered," says ETH Zurich in a press release. "Smaller landslides occur more frequently than larger ones. By organising itself around a so called critical state, the pile maintains its original height when viewed over an extended period of time."
When energy from the sun is given off in sudden bursts, radiation spans across the electromagnetic spectrum. And this happens statistically on a regular basis.
By understanding that, as well as how fluid dynamics works (the sun's plasma), the team spent a week working with their calculations on a supercomputer. Their results showed that this new model accurately predicted solar flares.
Researchers, however, point out that their predictions are only based on statistics. So what they're really predicting is only the probability of solar flares within a specified time.
