Could the dream come true? A new study by Stanford researchers
suggests that such forecasts may one day be possible—not on
Earth, but on the Sun. "We have learned to detect sunspots
before they are visible to the human eye," says Stathis
Ilonidis, a PhD student at Stanford University. "This could lead
to significant advances in space weather forecasting." Sunspots
are the "butterfly's wings" of solar storms. Visible to the
human eye as dark blemishes on the solar disk, sunspots are the
starting points of explosive flares and coronal mass ejections
(CMEs) that sometimes hit our planet 93 million miles away.
Consequences range from Northern Lights to radio blackouts to
power outages. Astronomers have been studying sunspots for more
than 400 years, and they have pieced together their basic
characteristics: Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism
that float in solar plasma. Although the details are still
debated, researchers generally agree that sunspots are born deep
inside the Sun via the action of the S