A bright comet fell into the sun on October 2, 2011 in synch with a coronal mass ejection bursting out on the other side. Credit: ESA/NASA/LASCO C2
The National Academy of Sciences has estimated that a major solar storm could cause $2 trillion in damages, frying GPS satellites and short-circuiting electrical grids. Many of those storms originate at sunspots, dark blemishes on the sun’s surface that are wellsprings of magnetic activity. But help is on the way: Last August scientists reported the first successful predictions of individual sunspots days before they appeared, opening up the possibility of accurately forecasting severe space weather.
Astronomers have been able to forecast trends in the number of sunspots since the 1800s, but predicting individual spots requires satellites that can probe the turbulent plasma flows deep beneath the sun’s surface. Remotely controlling instruments aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, located a million miles from ...
