Predicting Sunspots

Live Science

With a techniques borrowed from earthquake detection, researchers are learning to predict where sunspots will boil-up. That gives officials in charge of satellites, power grids and radio communications more warning of crippling geomagnetic storms.

Transcript

00:00Scientists are learning to predict sunspots before they can actually be seen.

00:07That's important because these dark stains on the sun's surface can herald scary solar flares and huge coronal mass ejections,

00:16which sometimes fry sensitive satellites in Earth orbit and cause power outages on the ground.

00:22Such storms are born deep inside the sun, results of titanic magnetic forces at work there.

00:29These turbulent bubbles boil up to the surface of our star,

00:34where astronomers have been watching them for more than 400 years.

00:39But just recently, astrophysicists, using techniques similar to those used for earthquake monitoring,

00:45have deduced that subtle vibrations rippling across the visible facade of the sun are correlated to disturbances far below.

00:52It's a technique they call helioseismology.

00:56In basic terms, sound waves travel faster across a submerged sunspot forming region than they do through the surrounding area.

01:03The acoustic energy signature may appear more than 15 seconds earlier if it's been ringing across a particularly big storm.

01:11That can give officials in charge of communications networks or power grids as much as two days' notice before a sunspot finally percolates up.

01:20That's plenty of time to know if the sunspot will be aimed at Earth.

01:25The trick now is to figure out which sunspots will produce flares and mass ejections, and exactly when they'll fire.

01:34But scientists don't know how to do that trick just yet.

01:38Now it's difficult.

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