A collaborative research effort from scientists in Belgium, Austria, Croatia, and Russia has developed a new method to determine the strength of the solar cycle, an institutional press release said.
In the 17th century, Galileo Galilei turned his telescope toward the Sun to find sunspots there. Over centuries, astronomers have seen the sunspots appear and disappear and even found a correlation between their frequency and a longer period of time i.e. 11 years, called the solar cycle., as the electrically charged gases move inside the Sun, they generate a magnetic field that flips every 11 years.
Like magnets, sunspots also exist in pairs or opposite polarities, and free magnetic energy accumulated in these loops can suddenly be released in the form of a flare or coronal mass ejection . In a matter of seconds, a solar flare can release energy that is 100,000 times more than the energy all power plants across the world generate every year, the press release added.
that were deorbited by SpaceX after a solar flare disrupted their mission. For a brief moment, communications lost due to a solar flare meant that airplanes disappeared over the radars in Sweden in 2015. To be in a position to better predict when solar flares might cause disruptions, as many as 80 observatories are now observing the Sun from all over the world.
The team showed that the maximal growth rate of sunspot activity during the ascending phase of a solar cycle is a reliable predictor of the amplitude of the solar cycle. Using a predictions of the amplitudes are more accurate when solar activity is considered separately for the two hemispheres of the Sun.
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