Sunspots are areas on the sun that are cooler than the rest of the sun and therefore appear darker. These can be as low as 1000 K, while normally the sun’s surface is 6000 K. They are caused by interactions between the gasses, the sun’s surface and the magnetic field of the sun.
“If you are close to a solar flare, that would be very, very harmful,” Wes Kyle, an astronomer at the Cincinnati Observatory, said. “The particles are electrons and protons moving at a very high speed, which means they can do a lot of damage when interacting with matter.”
More sunspots typically mean more solar flares. While this isn’t great news, due to the impact of solar flares on our communication systems, it however also means the northern lights will appear brighter.
“Most flares originate from the sunspots, so some surprising flares and pretty much all solar activity sort of originate from anywhere where the magnetic field is disturbed,” Kyle said.
Although they won’t affect most people, solar flares primarily affect humans in outer space. Some planes are redirected away from the poles when the phenomenon occurs to limit the amount of radiation passengers are subjected to.
“Folks on the International Space Station, because they’re up out of the atmosphere and are less protected, when they see a solar flare first coming, they will move to more shielded areas of the International Space Station,” Kyle said.
When AT&T had issues with their cell phone towers, a solar flare was happening at the same time. This caused a lot of speculation as to what actually happened to the towers. It turned out that there was likely a coding issue and the flares didn’t have anything to do with the issues. However, solar flares can affect satellites and therefore cellphone towers if preventive measures are not taken.
“A couple different things could happen,” Kyle said. “The particles themselves can actually just cause the equipment to malfunction. The other thing that could happen would be big bursts of energy coming from our sun that cause our magnetic field to fluctuate and fluctuations in magnetic fields can generate electric currents; you can generate electric currents on satellites.”
The sun operates in cycles of activity. The cycle will have more severe solar flares and will reset back into a calm scenario. The cycle is about an 11 year cycle and is going to peak very soon. That means that there will be a lot more flares and coronal mass ejection and activity for the moment.
A coronal mass ejection is similar to a solar flare but not exactly the same. While solar flares spew radiation from the sun, coronal mass ejections spew large amounts of solar material.
“One of the nice things is that our magnetic field shields most of the particles, but some of them do get through, and most of them get through around the pole,” Kyle said. “Which is why we get the northern lights.”