I spent last week working on a story about a local group of scientists who are tracking the space weather associated with solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It was published on the MIT web site here. One of the scientists I talked to mentioned that the same sunspot group that caused all the ruckus in late October will be rotating around Earthward again very soon and we could face more space weather in the next couple of weeks.

I find all this rather fascinating because it’s further proof that the Sun and Earth are linked not just by heat and light, but by interactions between our magnetic field and solar plasmas as well. We see the heat and light of course, but the other stuff is more or less flying under our radar screens, so to speak. Well, the guys over at Haystack Observatory do actually aim radar beams at the upper atmosphere of the Earth (the ionosphere) to measure how it changes as our planet is hit with each onslaught of space weather. Events like the recent outbursts are their bread and butter. Talk about star power!

You can track the Sun’s activity at: SpaceWeather Now or the European Space Agency and its spaceweather site. Follow for yourself over the next couple of weeks and see what kind of activity keeps the solar physicists and atmospheric scientists hopping! Plus, if we’re lucky, maybe there’ll be some more aurorae to watch as they light up the sky.