Operations

Solar flares could have temporarily worsened the hole in the ozone layer, particularly in the southern hemisphere, says Marc Duldig of the Australian Antarctic Division.

Bursts of energetic particles erupting from the sun during some solar flares can boost levels of ozone-destroying chemicals in our atmosphere. Researchers from the Division are using ground-based sensors to detect the high energy solar particles.

[Read more…] about Are solar flares damaging our ozone layer?

In March 1989, six million people in the Canadian province of Quebec suffered a nine-hour blackout due to currents induced in their electricity grid by a geomagnetic storm. The currents themselves were caused by charged particles from a solar coronal mass ejection which struck Earth. There are reports of a storm 150 years ago with many times that power.

Today, such events would be even more disastrous, knocking out the electronic and communications systems upon which we all depend.

That’s why the US, Australia and many other developed nations are investing in understanding and modelling the Sun-Earth system to enable us to forecast space weather, according to Colorado researcher Tim Fuller Rowell.

[Read more…] about Could space storms blackout our homes and phones?

By James Mitchell Crow

Australian-based researchers have recreated inside their laboratory the atmospheric conditions that cause auroras. One day the results of their experiments could power a mission to Venus or Mars.

Christine Charles from the Australian National University told delegates at the Australian Institute of Physics conference in Melbourne that their work will help physicists to understand the formation of the auroras—the undulating bands of lights visible in the night sky over the north and south poles. [Read more…] about Northern lights in the lab