With a techniques borrowed from earthquake detection, researchers are learning to predict where sunspots will boil-up. That gives officials in charge of satellites, power grids and radio communications more warning of crippling geomagnetic storms.
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00:00Scientists are learning to predict sunspots before they can actually be seen.
00:07That's important because these dark stains on the sun's surface can herald scary solar flares and huge coronal mass ejections,
00:16which sometimes fry sensitive satellites in Earth orbit and cause power outages on the ground.
00:22Such storms are born deep inside the sun, results of titanic magnetic forces at work there.
00:29These turbulent bubbles boil up to the surface of our star,
00:34where astronomers have been watching them for more than 400 years.
00:39But just recently, astrophysicists, using techniques similar to those used for earthquake monitoring,
00:45have deduced that subtle vibrations rippling across the visible facade of the sun are correlated to disturbances far below.
00:52It's a technique they call helioseismology.
00:56In basic terms, sound waves travel faster across a submerged sunspot forming region than they do through the surrounding area.
01:03The acoustic energy signature may appear more than 15 seconds earlier if it's been ringing across a particularly big storm.
01:11That can give officials in charge of communications networks or power grids as much as two days' notice before a sunspot finally percolates up.
01:20That's plenty of time to know if the sunspot will be aimed at Earth.
01:25The trick now is to figure out which sunspots will produce flares and mass ejections, and exactly when they'll fire.
01:34But scientists don't know how to do that trick just yet.
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