Space weather

Tonight’s Your Best Chance to See Northern Lights In Years

Millions of charged particles are rushing toward earth after a gigantic solar flare on Tuesday. Bad news for NASA’s latest mission, but good news for sky-watchers: Those charged particles also collide with the earth’s atmosphere to produce the ethereal-looking northern lights. Normally, northern lights, or auroras, are only visible at or near the pole, to…

The UK government has announced plans to fund a new 24/7 space-weather forecasting service. As Elizabeth Gibney of Nature News reports, the Met Office warnings will protect satellites and help prevent blackouts on Earth. At a cost of £4.6-million ($7.5-million), the service could also warn of an incoming Carrington storm. Image via NASA.

Become fluent in the vocabulary of solar flares and space weather

With all the exciting solar activity lately, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shared this helpful tutorial about the vocabulary of space weather on their Facebook page. Now you can tell your CMEs apart from your solar flares. https://gizmodo.com/what-the-hell-is-happening-on-the-sun-505535245

A massive solar storm could keep us grounded on Earth for a decade

It’s decently likely that, sometime in the future, a major solar storm will hit Earth, wreaking havoc on our infrastructure and crippling our satellites. But there’s a more long-term danger: space could become too dangerously radioactive to stay there. And some new research indicates that we could face a situation that keeps us from exploring…

Failed star is home to gigantic super-storm

A brown dwarf located 47 light-years away is behaving very strangely. The would-be star’s brightness is constantly changing, fluctuating by as much as 30% in just eight hours. This could be an atmospheric disturbance that dwarfs Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Brown dwarfs are objects that fall between the minimum mass of a dwarf star and…

Sunspot predictions now as accurate as your local weather report

How accurate do you expect your local weather report to be? Honestly, I’ll believe their predictions up to 48 hours, but anything beyond that is pushing it. Now it looks like our ability to predict sunspots is now at that same level, giving us valuable warning time for people in space, and infrastructure on the…

Massive eruption on the sun yesterday means a solar storm zooming by Earth tomorrow

This picture was taken by a NASA solar observatory yesterday, and it shows one of the biggest explosions we’ve ever seen on the sun. For perspective, look at the upper left corner. There’s a little circle the size of Earth. The explosion dwarfs our planet by many times. So what does this explosion mean for…

NASA is Building a ‘Solar Shield’ to Protect Power Grids from Space Weather

They’re out there, biding their time. Waiting patiently. And when you least expect it, they’re going to plunge you and everyone you care about into total darkness. Luckily, we can see solar storms coming from about 93 million miles away, and NASA is now in the process of creating a “Solar Shield” that should be…

Tonight’s northern lights will be incredible, thanks to solar explosions

The sun blasted mass quantities of plasma into space a few days ago, and the “coronal mass ejection” is headed straight for Earth. Which means we’re about to get some incredible aurora displays. Harvard astronomer Leon Golub explains that predicting space weather is an extremely inexact science, but that these times are likely to be…

New Satellite Will Provide Weather Forecasts — On The Sun

Worried about solar winds and space weather interfering with global cell phone reception, possibly plunging the world into a new Dark Ages? Apparently, so is NASA: they’ve designed a satellite for the sole purpose of monitoring space weather. Fueling and testing just began last week for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The satellite is now in…

The Sun Is Weaker Than It’s Been In 80 Years, Apparently

Fueling fears about the dimming sun, scientists are predicting that the current solar cycle is not only running a year or so late, but will also be the weakest cycle since 1928. Solar disaster! https://gizmodo.com/why-is-the-sun-getting-dimmer-5225214 The current cycle of activity, officially called Cycle 24, will peak somewhere around May 2013 with roughly 90 sunspots a…

Magnetic Structures Larger Than the Sun

We’ve long seen the results of solar flares on Earth, but haven’t been able to predict when they’ll strike next. New research released last week has given us a better understanding of solar weather. The massive, looping jets of superheated gas that erupt from the sun are driven by giant magnetic structures that extend out…