Although the spot is on the far side of the Sun, scientists detected it by monitoring its vibrational effects.
This August 6 and 7, a huge sunspot on the far side away from the Sun will turn towards Earth, which could cause solar flares and an intense burst of radiation in our star’s atmosphere.
Such disturbances, in turn, would trigger a geomagnetic storm on our planet, which would affect communication and GPS satellites orbiting close to Earth, as well as aircraft navigation systems. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center issued a forecast of an unstable geomagnetic field around Earth this weekend, which in the least severe of cases would mean the appearance of of northern lights.
Although the sunspot is on the far side of the Sun , scientists detected it by monitoring its vibratory effects.
“The Sun vibrates continuously, due to the convection bubbles that hit the surface”, said Dean Pesnell, Project Scientist at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
The strong magnetic field of the Manch The sun slows down these vibrations, which travel through the entire star. As a result, observatories like SDO can monitor sunspots on the far side of our host star for the delay in these vibrational waves, even though they can only see its near side.
“The larger the sunspot and the stronger the magnetic field, the greater this delay,” added Pesnell.
Regarding the predictions for this weekend, Pesnell stated that “there is a filament heading in the direction of the sunspot, so there could be some coronal mass ejections”.
