Personal tools
Log in

Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

INAF

Istituto italiano di astrofisica - national institute for astrophisics

Ciao
You are here: Home INAF News Solar Storm and auroras in progress

Solar Storm and auroras in progress

NASA claimed the second strongest solar storm just happened since the beginning of the new solar cycle. The comments of INAF’s solar astrophysicists Alessandro Bemporad and Mauro Messerotti.

In these hours the Sun, our star, is under the constant investigation of the NASA space observatories Sdo (Solar Dynamics Obervatory), Soho (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and Ace (Advanced Composition Explorer), together with the European satellite Proba 2. The reason lies in the strong activity on its surface that caused intense emissions of X-rays, high-energy particles and Coronal Mass Ejections headed toward Earth.

“Now the Sun is active and its eruptions are already remarkable” says Alessandro Bemporad, a researcher at INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino (Turin). Our star didn’t reach its climax yet, but the next storms could be more and more powerful”.

“By now we recorded black-outs in shortwave communications, but in the following hours we can expect to face more relevant problems in satellite telecommunications and breaks in GPS systems” suggests Mauro Messerotti, Sun-Earth interactions expert at INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste. The storm began soon after the midnight of march, 7th. “A solar flare occurred – continues Messerotti – and is ranked as the second most intense in this new solar cycle recorded so far. Soon after another flare, less energetic, developed. This one produced an intense particle flux, protons in particular, which then smashed on our space systems”.

Filed under: ,

FIRST IMAGE OF A REGION OF THE MILKY WAY FROM THE PEGASUS SURVEY

Jan 16, 2023

FIRST IMAGE OF A REGION OF THE MILKY WAY FROM THE PEGASUS SURVEY Led by INAF and Macquarie University, a portion of our Galaxy has been imaged in great detail as part of the PEGASUS survey - a radio astronomy project designed to discover more about the Milky Way

Studying the birth of exoplanets with chemistry

Sep 23, 2022

Studying the birth of exoplanets with chemistry A new study led by Elenia Pacetti, PhD student at La Sapienza University and INAF, jointly uses ultra-volatile, volatile, and refractory elements in the atmospheres of giant planets to develop a unified method to shed light on how and where giant planets form. The new work, published in The Astrophysical Journal, paves the road to the exoplanetary studies of the ESA mission Ariel