We can now predict dangerous solar flares a day before they happen

 A new method to predict solar flares could help us to organize for potential disasters caused by these huge eruptions on the sun.

Predicting solar flares is difficult because we don’t know exactly how they're triggered. While telescopes can see a flare when it occurs, providing some warning, energetic particles can reach Earth in as little as 8 minutes – potentially putting astronauts’ health in danger and damaging satellites before we've got time to react.

“A big flare could be a potential risk to our society,” says Kanya Kusano at the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research in Japan. “Therefore the prediction of solar flares is crucial.”

Kusano and his colleagues think they will help. The team says its “kappa-scheme” method can predict solar flares many hours before they happen. Applying the strategy to data from between 2008 and 2019, the group was able to predict seven of the nine largest flares, called X-class flares, up to 24 hours prior to time.

Previous methods of prediction have at the most a 50 percent success rate, says Kusano, looking forward to observations of sunspots inactive regions of the sun. The kappa-scheme instead relies on the strong magnetic fields related to solar flares.

Before a flare begins, electric currents flow along the sun’s flux lines. When two of those lines overlap, they undergo a process called reconnection, snapping the lines together and releasing an unlimited amount of energy – a flare.

The team was able to predict where and when these reconnection events were likely to occur using magnetic and imaging data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). the 2 flares that couldn’t be predicted had reconnection events far above the solar surface that weren’t within the viewing field of the SDO, which is why they were missed.

Kusano hopes the tactic will be accustomed to predict large solar flares in the future. “We are now trying to implement this discovery for an awfully practical forecast of space weather,” he says.