The Sun Is About To Get More Active Than It Has for a Decade — And It Could Lead To Power Outages, Grounded Flights, and Stunning Auroras
The sun may be waking up after almost a decade of relative calm, scientists say — and that could cause problems on Earth.
The solar storms that rage on our star during its active period create bursts of electromagnetic energy that can affect everything from the power grid to GPS signals.
These so-called solar maximums occur roughly every 11 years, and they haven’t been much of a problem in the past.
Scientists, however, fear that our reliance on electricity and interconnectivity could mean we’re far more vulnerable to their effects this time around.
The sun’s poles are flipping
The sun is a big ball of plasma, heated at its center. The plasma, which is made of charged particles, boils toward the surface, cools down, and sinks back toward the core again.
That motion, called convection, is what creates strong magnetic fields at the poles and smaller, local magnetic fields at the surface of the sun.
Every 11 years or so, the sun becomes “convectively unstable,” meaning its magnetic fields become so unstable that the magnetic north and south poles abruptly flip, throwing our star’s polarity out of whack, said Mathew Owens, a professor of space physics at the University of Reading.
That instability causes havoc in the magnetic fields at the surface of the sun, which become much more active. That’s when the solar maximum happens.
Solar storms could ground planes
That energy can affect communication by messing with the ionosphere, a layer of charged particles in our upper atmosphere. That could cause problems for air travel.
Source: Business Insider
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