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ERUPTIONS on the sun’s surface may spark similar blasts across the star. The finding could help improve the forecasting of these eruptions, which disrupt power grids on Earth.
Solar eruptions are known to prompt further explosions nearby. But when two major eruptions, separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometres, both occurred on 1 August, and of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, California, wondered whether they were connected.
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The pair turned to detailed images of the sun from August. Only a portion is visible at one time, but over a week, hidden areas became visible, revealing previously unknown distortions to the magnetic field. The researchers used these to estimate the magnetic field lines on 1 August over the sun’s entire surface and to map all solar events onto these lines.
This showed that the two major eruptions were linked to each other, and to other events, via the same deformations of the sun’s global magnetic field. The work will appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research.