Solar Storm - Multiverse - Solar Week Message Board

Solar Week - Ask a Question

Come here during Solar Week (next one: March 22-26, 2021) to interact. To post a question, click on your area of interest from the topics below, and then click on the "Ask New Question" button. Or EMAIL or tweet or plant in Answer Garden your question about the Sun or life as a scientist to us -- and watch for it to appear here. You can also visit our FAQs (frequently asked questions). In between Solar Weeks in October and March, you can view all the archives here.

Forums
Search Forum
Advanced SearchTopicsPosts

Prev Go to previous topic

Go to next topic

Last Post 4/15/2010 8:16 AM by Paulett Liewer

Solar Storm

1 Replies

Sort:


You are not authorized to post a reply.

Author

Messages

Anonymous

Posts:

4/15/2010 7:39 AM
Erik D How can you tell if a solar storm is coming toward's earth?

Paulett Liewer

Basic Member

Posts:113

4/15/2010 8:16 AM
Hi Erik, We have a couple of ways now of telling if a solar storm might come to Earth. First, if there's a big flare near the center of the solar disk, it may result in a storm that reaches Earth. Also, a coronal mass ejections (CME), which is a major part of a solar storm, has a certain appearance when seen from the coronagraph on the near-Earth spacecraft SOHO. If it's headed towards Earth, it make a white ring around the Sun as seen in a SOHO coronagraph image. We call these "halo CMEs." Of course,we also now have the two twin STEREO spacecraft (see http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/) with coronagraphs that can see two views of a CME simultaneously. These spacecraft are now looking at the Sun from quite a different viewpoint than SOHO..And using these spacecraft, we can determined if the CME is going to impact Earth. Paulett