I hope someone can ELI5. I mean, we’re told that sunlight/etc we see is 8 minutes old - it took 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth. The radiation, light, etc all travel at the speed of light, neither slower nor faster.
If we can see anything on the sun, it happened 8 minutes ago. It’s not like we’re looking out over a Kansas field and see a tornado coming.
Further, there’s this from a quick Google (while attempting to answer this question myself), from Oct 13 2023:
“How much warning do we have for solar storms?
So it should come as no surprise that a team at NASA has been busily applying AI models to solar storm data to develop an early warning system that they think could give the planet about 30 minutes’ notice before a potentially devastating solar storm hits a particular area.”
So how are we getting a notice one or two days in advance here? Is the sun currently ejecting matter into space, intersecting the place in our orbit we’ll occupy tomorrow (or the next day)? Or is this like predicting a volcanic eruption, basing it on other observable behavior?
I hope someone can ELI5. I mean, we’re told that sunlight/etc we see is 8 minutes old - it took 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth. The radiation, light, etc all travel at the speed of light, neither slower nor faster.
If we can see anything on the sun, it happened 8 minutes ago. It’s not like we’re looking out over a Kansas field and see a tornado coming.
Further, there’s this from a quick Google (while attempting to answer this question myself), from Oct 13 2023:
“How much warning do we have for solar storms? So it should come as no surprise that a team at NASA has been busily applying AI models to solar storm data to develop an early warning system that they think could give the planet about 30 minutes’ notice before a potentially devastating solar storm hits a particular area.”
So how are we getting a notice one or two days in advance here? Is the sun currently ejecting matter into space, intersecting the place in our orbit we’ll occupy tomorrow (or the next day)? Or is this like predicting a volcanic eruption, basing it on other observable behavior?