solar storms tagged posts

Tourists normally have to pay big money and brave cold climates for a chance to see an aurora, but last weekend many people around the world simply had to look up to see these colorful displays dance across the sky.

Usually banished to the poles of Earth, the auroras strayed as far as Mexico, southern Europe and South Africa on the evening of May 10, delighting skygazers and filling social media with images of exuberant pinks, greens and purples.

But for those charged with protecting Earth from powerful solar storms such as the one that caused the auroras, a threat lurks beneath the stunning colors.

“We need to understand that behind this beauty, there is danger,” Quentin Verspieren, the European Space Agency’s space safety program coordinator, told AFP.

Mike Bettwy of the...

In connection with violent solar eruptions, large variations occur in electron density in the ionosphere over Greenland, which interferes with GPH navigation signals as well as flight and satellite communication. The figure (right) shows large electron density in red and small density in blue. This phenomenon gives rise to high electron speeds in the ionosphere, exceeding 1,000 metres per second (left) and resulting in violent energy bursts. For the first time ever, researchers from DTU have demonstrated the phenomenon which cannot yet be explained. (Illustration: DTU Space).

New research from DTU, JPL and University of New Brunswick shows that eruptions on the Sun’s surface not only send bursts of energetic particles into Earth’s atmosphere causing disturbances in our planet’s magnetic fi...

Illustration showing how solar energetic particles may cause dielectric breakdown in lunar regolith in a permanently shadowed region (PSR). Tiny breakdown events could occur throughout the floor of the PSR. Credits: NASA/Andrew Jordan

Powerful solar storms can charge up the soil in frigid, permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles, and may possibly produce “sparks” that could vaporize and melt the soil, perhaps as much as meteoroid impacts. This alteration may become evident when analyzing future samples from these regions that could hold the key to understanding the history of the moon and solar system.

The moon has almost no atmosphere, so its surface is exposed to the harsh space environment...