When solar flares hurl particles into space, this has an impact on Earth. | Photo: Vievering et al. (2024)

The Solar Orbiter has now been orbiting the Sun for four years. Its on-board equipment includes a powerful x-ray telescope, co-developed and supervised by Säm Krucker of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). It measures the particles that solar flares hurl into space. A data analysis has shown that an extreme event two years ago was not in fact two separate eruptions, as people had assumed, but a single, two-phase eruption.

Krucker’s ultimate goal is to predict weather events of this kind in space, because, in a worst-case scenario, such an eruption could destroy all our electronic devices if it reached us here on Earth.

J. T. Vievering et al.: Unraveling the Origins of an Extreme Solar Eruptive Event with Hard X-Ray Imaging Spectroscopy. The Astrophysical Journal (2024)