Topic
Solar flares, coronal mass ejections and geomagnetic storms, and how their effects reach ground systems.
SwRI-led researchers built a probabilistic framework that scores far-side solar active regions, using whole-Sun maps from 2010 to 2014. Helioseismic far-side detections sometimes prove to be ghosts, and the scoring is meant to keep them out of the models behind space-weather forecasts.
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TU Braunschweig and University of Tokyo researchers report the first demonstration of reversed magnetic-field rotation in solar-wind turbulence. The flip sits where the plasma changes from fluid-like to particle-like behavior, according to the team.
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University of Oulu models show the strongest Kelvin-Helmholtz waves at Earth's magnetic edge form in the winter hemisphere. So far the evidence comes from simulation.
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Solar Orbiter flew through a large magnetic switchback and used the particles inside it to trace the kink to a source on the Sun's surface. The result comes from a single crossing, so it limits how switchbacks can begin but cannot yet say how most of them do.
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Smile, a European-Chinese mission, began science operations after its ultraviolet camera caught a daylight aurora over the North Pole. The July frames show the hardware works, and findings on solar particles and Earth's magnetic field still await more data and a recalibrated X-ray imager.
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Microsoft Research's machine-learning pipeline turns solar-wind forecasts into risk estimates for 66,935 U.S. substations, 30 to 60 minutes ahead. Its scores come from forecasts of fast magnetic-field change, so acting on a warning at a particular substation still needs a field test.
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ESA cleared the joint European-Chinese Smile mission for science on 23 September, after 95 days of commissioning in orbit. Its aurora camera is recording now, while the X-ray imager meant to map the magnetopause waits for stray light to fade in mid-October.
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Sandra Chapman reports in The Astrophysical Journal that solar maxima end in a sharp sunspot cutoff whose count predicts the next cycle, and her own forecast for Cycle 26 follows the drop she expects in 2028.
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A Kyushu University team moved two laser spots on a carbon target to change the density and magnetic field feeding a reconnection layer. Once a current sheet had formed, the measured rates came out close anyway.
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The railway line in the story did not open until 1846, so a team led by Lancaster University went back to timetables, newspapers and magnetic records and moved the 16-minute delay to 18 October 1848.
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Xingzhi Lyu and colleagues have reconstructed how the outer Van Allen belt lost its most energetic electrons during the strongest geomagnetic storm since 2003, and the reconstruction worked only under a tight timing assumption.
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Swift sent gamma-ray burst positions to telescopes on the ground within seconds for nearly 22 years. Solar storms thickened the air at its altitude. Scientific American reports reentry no later than December.
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Krivova's team fitted flare energy against active-region area using seven years of Solar Dynamics Observatory data, then pushed that fit through the largest sunspots in 400 years of records to ask what the Sun could manage.
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A Geophysical Research Letters team paired aurora cameras with ground receivers across the US and Canada, and found hours of amplitude scintillation and 10-metre positioning error in mid-latitudes long treated as quiet.
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