CRISISBOOM

ras.org

The largest disturbances to the Earth’s geomagnetic environment occur when it is buffeted by solar material hurled in our direction by explosive changes in the Sun’s atmosphere. These Coronal Mass Ejections or CMEs contain approximately a billion tonnes of ionized gas or plasma and can have a dramatic and damaging impact on everything from satellites to power grids.

A visible light image of the CME as it travelled from the Sun towards the Earth on 20 March 2010 made with the HI instrument on the STEREO observatory. The x-axis of the image corresponds to a distance of 48 million km from left to right. Credit: Anthony Williams / NASA / Richard Harrison

Now a team of scientists have used two spacecraft to study these events in unprecedented detail. Graduate student Anthony Williams of the University of Leicester will present their results on Tuesday 19 April at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales.

Mr Williams and his team used the Heliospheric Imagers (HI) on the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft to examine the internal structure of an Earth-impacting CME – seen as sunlight scattered from high density blobs of plasma – as it travels outwards from the Sun. They compared this with the internal structure measured in situ by the Read more…