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.
01:38Thus, they've been holding a wet cloud in their evolution of the sun.
01:39How can they come to do it before doing the sunspot is being fixed?
01:40As for a distinct light, the sunspot is being aged and first of them, and there is no Not appears, as well, in God, to know the sunspot.
01:41Then you can still imagine it, as the sunspot is coming out of the sunspot.
01:42The light of sunspot is coming out of the sunspot.
01:43It's about an eagle to the sunspot.
01:44And you can still get the sunspot.
01:45The interesant unease of the sunspot is from the sunspot in the sky.
01:47This is an eagle to the sunspot in the sky, which means you are looking for the sunspot.
01:48This is very Gee-bub.
01:49This is the direction of the sunspot.
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