PREDICTING when solar storms will arrive has always been hit-and-miss, but a
study of how they interact with the normal solar wind will now let researchers
predict an accurate 12-hour storm window.
The Sun blows out its regular solar wind at a speed of 250 to 800 kilometres
per second, but every so often it belches out a bigger mass of material known as
a coronal mass ejection (CME)—often the start of a solar storm. The
initial speed of a CME can vary from 20 to 2000 km/s. Because of this widely
varying speed, and the complicated interactions between…
