ALIEN STORMS
INCREDIBLE WEATHER ON OTHER WORLDS IS OUR SUN BECOMING MORE DEADLY? WHAT CAUSES THEM
© Tobias Roetsch
OUR ANGRY, STORMY SUN
We know our Sun as a brilliantly bright sphere that rises in the east and sets in the west each day. That’s a simple way to describe it; what really occurs on its surface is far from the impression it gives as it hangs, almost calmly, in the daytime sky
While going near the Sun would be suicide, with the searing heat and penetrating radiation combining to fry you alive in your spacesuit, technology has revealed this star to be an angry, bubbling cauldron of solar activity.
First up are solar flares – bursts of radiation from the sudden release of magnetic energy from active regions on the Sun’s surface, the photosphere. These regions are centred on sunspots, which are tangled knots of magnetic fields. The flares release as much as a sixth of the total amount of energy that the Sun releases every second, with much of it in X-rays or ultraviolet light. The energy of a flare can drive a cloud of charged particles to escape the solar corona in a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME becomes a giant cloud of plasma hurtling through space and, when CMEs are pointed towards Earth, they cause solar storms