This story is from August 3, 2016

Solar flares: Experts rely on wave

Astrophysicists the world over believe that the magnetic field in the Sun organise as uni formly twisted cylindrical tubes of magnetic energy that well up to the visible surface of the star as sunspots before ejecting flares.
Solar flares: Experts rely on wave
Scientists believe that the finding of the emergence of sun spots can help them develop a method to predict solar flares. (Representative photo)
Non-uniform, twisted magnetic energy from sun takes scientists closer to prediction of sun storms
While the night of September 1, 1856 sent shock waves among telegraphers after telegraph systems went haywire across the world a few hours after English astronomer Richard Carrington recorded the 'first and largest' solar flare to have struck the planet, it led to a series of researches attempting to study and predict these solar storms.

Astrophysicists the world over believe that the magnetic field in the Sun organise as uni formly twisted cylindrical tubes of magnetic energy that well up to the visible surface of the star as sunspots before ejecting flares.
But a team from Indian Institute of Astrophysics and University of Oslo, Norway has found, through a numerical model, these fluxes can have non-uniform twist.
Scientists believe that the finding of the emergence of sun spots can help them develop a method to predict these solar flares, as they often occur above the sunspots. Developing a method to predict solar flares is important as it often disrupts space communication systems the world rely on.
Solar flares release magnetic energy in the form of heat, solar magnetic particles, x-rays and gamma rays. They can affect anything from terrestrial radars to satellite and mobile communications, GPS signals, flight rerouting and communications.

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the total cost of X class solar flare, the biggest type of flare, hitting the earth can be as high as $1 trillion. The magnitude of the energy is as huge as the energy delivered by the impact of a 10-km-wide asteroid.
For the study, researchers picked `delta' sunspots, one of the four categories of sunspots, as they contribute more than 95% of the most intense solar flares, which releases x-rays though they constitute less than 25% of all the sunspots seen dur ing the sun's 11-year solar cycle.
The team carried out numerical simulations on super computers to study how the flux tubes pass through the sun's turbulent interior and rise to the surface resulting in a sunspot.
Lead scientist of the study Piyali Chatterjee said that delta sunspots have a complex magnetic topology. "Magnetic polarity (positive and negative) spots lying very close to each other in the umbra surrounded by a single penumbra increases magnetic tension in the region. 95% of the exotic x rays we receive from the sun comes from such regions," she said. With the numerical simulations, scientists fed suitable initial conditions like pressure, density and an estimate of the initial magnetic field, which was as simple as a horizontal magnetised sheet. The simulation produced several flares with energies similar to those observed for moderate flares in our sun.
Scientists said in future, simulations such as these can be used to provide an estimate of maximum flare energy that our sun can ever produce. "Ours is the first study, which has produced flares with energies observed in the real sun," said Chatterjee. However, the amount of free energy available for any given sunspot region for such energetic eruptions is a trillion dollar question.
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