Researcher and NASA space scientist Neel Savan from the Imperial College London has developed a first of its kind tool to aid in the fight to protect the Earth from the suns deadly solar storms called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
Up to this point, scientists have only been able to detect the deadly coronal mass ejections with somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour before they hit the Earth. Thanks to Neels new tool, scientists are now able to predict these CMEs with sometimes more than 24 hours in advance. The deadly busts from the sun have the power to permanently damage the satellites in Earths orbit, possibly wiping out commonly used things like GPS.
Neels solar modelling tool lets the scientists get a closer look at specific areas where these CMEs are known to commonly come from. Considering the sun is over 100X the size of the Earth, there is a lot of real estate to have to keep an eye on. By just monitoring the “hot” spots on the sun, we can now narrow the focus onto certain areas a opposed to the entire sun.
Neels system is not fully integrated yet as additional testing is required, although once it is fine tuned and tested, this new system will be implemented world wide to collectively help watch for these deadly solar storms.
Source: ndtv