Mysterious ‘sparklers’ appear before solar flares, NASA says. What do they mean?

A mysterious phenomenon that may provide advance warning of potentially destabilizing solar flares has been found, according to NASA.

“Sparklers” have been seen dancing across areas of the sun that later exploded, according to a study by NorthWest Research Associates, a scientific research organization.

“They found that above the regions about to flare, the corona produced small-scale flashes – like small sparklers before the big fireworks,” NASA said in a news release.

“The scientists used a newly created image database of the Sun’s active regions ... The analysis revealed small flashes in the corona preceded each flare.”

Solar flares are radiation bursts that produce the most significant explosions across the solar system, NASA says.

The impact is felt for millions of miles across space, scientists say, and the risks can include “endangering astronauts, disrupting radio communications, and even causing large electrical blackouts.”

Among the most notorious examples was the Carrington Event in 1859, when a series of large coronal plasma “bubbles” *CMEs) were “ejected from the Sun” before colliding with Earth.

“Intense geomagnetic storms caused global telegraph lines to spark, setting fire to some telegraph offices,” NASA reported. “A similar storm today could have a catastrophic effect on modern power grids and telecommunication networks. ... The total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina.”

The discovery of advance “sparklers” on the sun has given scientists hope they might be used to predict solar flares.

NASA reports the flashes were “seen hours to a day ahead of the flares.”

“We can get some very different information in the corona than we get from the photosphere, or ‘surface’ of the Sun,” the study’s lead author KD Leka said in the release.

“Our results may give us a new marker to distinguish which active regions are likely to flare soon and which will stay quiet over an upcoming period of time.”

The data used in the study was collected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, combining more than “eight years of images taken of active regions in ultraviolet and extreme-ultraviolet light.”

Previous studies have looked into how the sun’s lower atmosphere might indicate solar flare activity, including sunspots, NASA says.

This story was originally published January 23, 2023 at 12:32 PM with the headline "Mysterious ‘sparklers’ appear before solar flares, NASA says. What do they mean?."