British scientists say a new look at solar flares could improve predictions of when the explosions in the atmosphere of the Sun, which can send storms of potentially dangerous solar particles toward Earth, will occur.
Such storms, known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), if strong enough, can affect satellites in Earth's orbit and even interfere with electrical grids on our planet's surface.
An international study led by researchers at the University of Cambridge examined new footage of activity on the sun and observed lines of magnetism erupting from its surface looping across each other, resulting in a solar eruption as big as 35 Earths.
The huge energy build-up ended in an explosive jettisoning into space of magnetic energy.
The finding could help in predicting when such large events will occur, allowing warnings of potentially dangerous space weather that could hit the Earth, the researchers said.
"We care about this as during flares we can have CMEs and sometimes they are sent in our direction," Cambridge scientist, Jaroslav Dudik says. "Human civilization is nowadays maintained by technology and that technology is vulnerable to space weather. Indeed, CMEs can damage satellites and therefore have an enormous financial cost."
One solar storm event had a massive impact on Earth even before civilization became as technology-dependent as it is today, the researchers noted.
In 1859, a solar storm created night skies with levels of brightness that allowed people to read newspapers easily as they could in daytime and telegraph systems -- the highest technology of the period -- caught fire.
Researchers have long known that solar flares occur when the Sun's magnetic field becomes greatly distorted, causing magnetic lines to continuously reconnect with each other as they flip around and creating stronger magnetic structures.
In the way a bundle of straight pieces of rope or cord that has been coiled around can hold energy, the magnetic field lines hold it until it reaches too great a level, whereupon it is released.
"You build the stress slowly until a point where they are no longer sustainable," Cambridge astrophysicist, Helen Mason says. "The field lines say they have had enough and 'ping,' they go back to something simple."
A flare and a possible CME is the result of that "ping," the researchers said, creating temperatures in the ejections of 20 million degrees Centigrade.
The researchers have published their study in The Astrophysical Journal.
