Courtesy of the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory — this image is updated frequently so you can follow the progress of these active regions across the solar disk. (SOHO)
It’s acting up again. In late October it was quite busy with flares and coronal mass ejections that subsequently impacted the Earth’s magnetosphere — and subsquently lit up our skies with auroral displays, disrupted communications and other services, and generally made solar and atmospheric physicists very happy with lots of new data to study. You thought it was over, right? Well, not quite. As it turns out, with the Sun, what goes around comes around. And, the sunspot regions that were responsible for the last space weather storm, that rotated around to the other side of the Sun, are on their way back. In fact, this image from SOHO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) shows the three regions (in bright white) that are going to make life interesting for everybody for the next week or so.
Does this mean we’ll be seeing more aurorae, tracking more flares, battening down the electronic hatches to save our satellites from heavy spaceweather? Maybe. There was another flare last week that lit the skies with aurorae, and chances are it’ll happen again. So, keep your eyes peeled, visit the SOHO site, and Spaceweather.com for regular updates on what the Sun is doing.
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.
