ScienceDaily

Massive explosions on the sun unleash radiation that could kill astronauts in space.

Now, researchers from the U.S. and South Korea have developed a warning system capable of forecasting the radiation from these violent solar storms nearly three hours (166 minutes) in advance, giving astronauts, as well as air crews flying over Earth’s polar regions, time to take protective action.

Physicists from the University of Delaware and from Chungnam National University and Hanyang University developed the system and report on it in Space Weather: The International Journal of Research and Applications, published by the American Geophysical Union.

Prof. John Bieber at UD’s Bartol Research Institute, based in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, directed the scientific project. The article’s lead author is Su Yeon Oh, a postdoctoral researcher from Chungnam National University, who worked with Bieber on the project at UD.

“Traveling nearly at the speed of light, it takes just 10 minutes for the first particles ejected from a solar storm to reach Earth,” Bieber says. These sun storms can cover thousands of miles on the sun, like a wave of exploding hydrogen bombs.

The researchers used data collected by two neutron monitors installed years ago at the South Pole by UD — one inside and one outside the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station — to determine the intensity of the high-energy, fast-moving particles that arrive to Earth first from solar storms. These particles can carry energies over 500 megaelectron volts (MeV) — that’s over 500 million electron volts.

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