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In the Sun’s fiery upper atmosphere, a team of scientists has found new clues that could help predict when and where the next solar flare (also known as a solar flare) might erupt.
Using data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), researchers from the scientific organization NorthWest Research Associates (NWRA) identified small signals in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere, the corona, that may help identify which regions of the Sun are most likely to produce solar flares, which are energetic bursts of light and particles released by the Sun.
They found that, above regions about to flare, the corona often produced small-scale flashes, much like small flares before big fireworks.
Later, this information could help improve the prediction of space weather flares and storms, both altered conditions in space caused by the Sun’s activity. Space weather can affect Earth in many ways: producing auroras, endangering astronauts, disrupting radio communications and even causing major power outages.
Scientists have previously studied how activity in the lower layers of the Sun’s atmosphere — such as the photosphere and chromosphere — can indicate impending flare activity in active regions, which are often marked by clusters of sunspots. , or regions of strong magnetism on the Sun’s surface that are darker and cooler compared to their surroundings. The new findings, published in the scientific journal The Astrophysical Journaladd to that image.
“We can get very different information in the corona than we get from the photosphere, or ‘surface’ of the Sun,” said KD Leka, lead author of the new study and who is also a Designated Foreign Professor at Nagoya University in Japan. “Our results may give us a new marker to distinguish which active regions are likely to flare up soon and which will remain quiet for an upcoming period of time.”
For their research, the scientists used a newly created database of images of the Sun’s active regions captured by SDO. This resource, publicly available and described in a companion article also published in The Astrophysical Journal, combines more than eight years of images of active regions taken in ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet light. Led by Karin Dissauer and designed by Eric L. Wagner, the NWRA team’s new database makes it easier for scientists to use data from the atmospheric imager (AIA) aboard SDO to conduct large statistical studies.
“This is the first time that a database like this has been made available to the scientific community, and it will be very useful for studying many topics, not just active regions about to produce flares,” Dissauer said.
The NWRA team studied a large sample of active regions from the database, using statistical methods developed by Graham Barnes, who is a member of the team. The analysis revealed that there are often small, intense changes in coronal brightness before solar flares. These and other new insights will give researchers a better understanding of the physics that take place in these magnetically active regions, with the goal of developing new tools to predict solar flares.
“With this research, we’re really starting to dig in,” Dissauer said. “In the future, combining all this information from the surface to the corona should allow meteorologists to make better predictions about when and where solar flares will occur.”
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland