Observing the Sun andForecasting Solar Flares

Workshop introducing the Sunspotter citizen science project as part of the FLARECAST public engagement programme

FLARECAST has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement640216

We can look at the sun with naked eyes only for a very short moment during sunsets.

During daytime, we need to protect our eyes with eclipse glasses.

However, when there is no eclipse there is not much to see.

In order to see some interesting details we need telescopes.

We can observe sunspots with a simple telescope.

If we want to see more details, we can visit an observatory with better telescopes.

There are scratches and spots.

But sometimes we don‘t see anything at all.

We need to go above the clouds, mounting telescopes on a satellite.

On this satellite, we have four different telescopes.

From space, we can observe the sun without being disturbed by the weather on our planet.

Zooming in allows us to see the sunspot in great detail.

What is this spot?

What is going on here?

Another advantage of a space telescope:

We can observe light from the sun that cannot get through the atmosphere of the Earth.

This is the sun in ultraviolet light bubbling with hot gas.

Huge explosions may occur near sunspot areas – solar flares.

They may blast off millions of tons of matter into space.

See an example of an explosion:

a solar flare ejects a large cloud of particles.

See what we already know about solar flares.

Solar flares may hit the Earth

We need to know in advance, when they will happen.

We do research

working with people from several countries

studying how we can forecast solar flares automatically.

We named the project FLARECAST.

What we know is

that extremely strong magnetic fields

constantly stir the solar surface up.

We also know that

solar flares occur when these magnetic fields

become too stressed.

Using a computer programme we create images of the magnetic field from images made by one of the telescopes on board the satellite we saw before.

Here, we see two very strong magnetic fields just near the sunspot.

When they get squeezed and mingled together, they release their energy in a huge explosion. This can trigger a solar storm as seen in the movie.

When the magnetogram looks like this, we know that there won‘t be any solar flares in the next few days.

Today‘s magnetogram:

Would you expect any solar flares in the next few days?

Space telescopes produce a huge amount of images

Scientists cannot classify them alone.

We need your help!

Contribute to science by helping scientists classify a set of 60 000 magnetograms.

Get started after the following mini-training.