5 August 1999 Ref. Dr Andrew Conway of the University of Glasgow, who works with Dr Alec MacKinnon at the University of Glasgow and Dr Keith Macpherson at the University of Oxford, will describe this ambitious undertaking at the UK Solar Physics meeting in Guernsey on Tuesday 10th August. A great variety of activity disturbs the surface of the Sun, and the surrounding solar corona, which becomes visible during a total eclipse.
Solar flares release huge amounts of energy in the form of light and high-speed particles.
Coronal mass ejections send vast clouds of solar gas out into the solar system, and the Sun becomes peppered with dark regions called sunspots. Such events are related and are all linked to the Sun's magnetic field, which becomes most complex and tangled at solar maxima, roughly every 11 years. Although astronomers have known for many years that sunspot numbers rise and fall over a period of approximately 11 years, the precise length of the cycle and the maximum numbers of sunspots varies from one cycle to another in a manner that has proved very difficult to forecast. And there are good reasons why it would be very valuable to predict solar activity. The streams of particles reaching the locality of the Earth can disrupt power supplies and endanger operations in space, for example.