In the past two days, the sun has unleashed three monster solar flares from a sunspot group the size of Jupiter. These powerful phenomena are amazing to watch, but if they were pointed toward the Earth, they would spell big trouble. Radiation from the sun's coronal mass ejections (CMEs) could disrupt our power grids and satellites.

Unfortunately, the sun and its atmosphere are devilishly hard to predict. But new research published today in Nature reveals new information about how CMEs form, which could help scientists improve their forecast.

Which Came First?

Tahar Amari and colleagues at the French National Center for Scientific Research started with two leading theories. One model says CMEs happen when a rope-like structure of magnetic flux gets twisted up, becomes unstable, and breaks. At that point, magnetic reconnection powers the ejection. The second model says the reverse is true, arguing that the flux rope forms because of the magnetic reconnection.

To find the best fit, the researchers looked at data from a real X-class solar flare from 2006 that came with an accompanying CME. The Japanese Hinode spacecraft was staring at the sun when these eruptions happened; that allowed the scientists to track the blasts and emulate them in a computer model of the sun.

According to their data, the first theory is correct. Four days before the eruption, magnetic energy in the region was low but was beginning to build up. Then, one day before the eruption, a rope of magnetic flux mushroomed from the sun's surface, becoming unstable as the underlying magnetic energy squeezed it upward. Eventually the tension couldn't hold and the rope snapped. This drove a mass ejection, sending a stream of particles hurtling toward Earth.

Related: The Looming Threat of a Solar Superstorm

The arching rainbow that the scientists saw in their study is not the magnetic field itself—that's invisible. Instead, it's the sun's atmospheric plasma, which is so highly charged that it has no choice but to trace the magnetic fields. This can make the guesswork tricky, notes Jaroslav Dudik, a scientist at Cambridge University who studies mathematical models of the sun and who was not involved in this new work.

"Since we observe the plasma response only, it is sometimes not too difficult to mistake the cause and the effect when analyzing the observations," he tells PM. "That is one reason why magnetic field extrapolations and 3D simulations of eruptions are necessary to understand what exactly is going on during an eruptive flare." In this case, the real data agrees nicely with the mathematical models, he says.

Predicting the Storm

Scientists aren't sure exactly what causes the magnetic fields to tangle up and become unstable in the first place, but they think it has to do with movements of solar plasma. In spots where the magnetic field penetrates the visible face of the sun, plasma jostles the magnetic fields around, causing them to dance wildly, braid and snap, and ultimately reconnect with each other.

Several groups of solar scientists are working on these problems, trying to plug in real data from sun-observing satellites to improve their models. Not all results agree, notes Miho Janvier, a scientist at the University of Dundee in the U.K. who studies solar models and wasn't involved in this work. She says future satellites such as Solar Orbiter, an ESA mission, and Solar Probe Plus, a NASA satellite, will fly close to the sun to get a better look.

The ultimate goal is to predict solar flares and eruptions so we and our satellites aren't caught off guard the next time the sun hurls radiation our way.

"To paraphrase Niels Bohr, it is difficult to make predictions—especially about the future," Dudik says. "We are still missing pieces of the puzzle. However, predicting solar flares and eruptions is one of the most important goals of solar physics. I remain optimistic about the prospects."

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