Huge Eruption Rocks the Sun

(Dec. 16) -- It wasn't just a little explosion. It was a massive eruption of more than 50 percent of the sun on Aug. 1.

After a three-month study of the incident that sent shock waves racing across the solar surface, physicists have just presented their findings of what they're calling the "Great Eruption," NASA reports.

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," said Karel Schrijver of the Lockheed-Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, Calif. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."

K. Schrijver & A. Title / NASA

Locations of key events are labeled in this extreme ultraviolet image of the sun, obtained by the Solar Dynamics Observatory during the Great Eruption of Aug. 1. White lines trace the sun's magnetic field

Since August, Schrijver and fellow solar physicist Alan Title have pored over the tons of data collected by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) space telescopes. They revealed their findings this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"To predict eruptions, we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions," Title said. "We have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire sun."

Understanding eruptions on the whole sun is vital to predicting solar activity, according to Rodney Viereck of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.

"This, in turn, would provide improved forecasts to our customers, such as electric power grid operators and commercial airlines, who could take action to protect their systems and ensure the safety of passengers and crew," Viereck said.

The Great Eruption resulted in more than a dozen shock waves, flares, filament eruptions and coronal mass ejections over half of the sun in a 28-hour period.

This was the first time that scientists witnessed such an event on the sun, and while most of it couldn't be seen from Earth, they watched the entire process via the SDO-STEREO spacecraft.

Further analysis of the data will, hopefully, help researchers more accurately predict solar disturbances.

"We're still sorting out cause and effect," Schrijver said. "Was the event one big chain reaction, in which one eruption triggered another -- bang, bang, bang -- in sequence?

"Or did everything go off together as a consequence of some greater change in the sun's global magnetic field?"

Read more at NASA's website.

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