NASA Science News | 16 July 2010
Sometimes a problem is so big, one country cannot handle it alone.
That's the message scientists are delivering at today's International Living with a Star (ILWS) meeting in Bremen, Germany, and representatives from more than 25 of the world's most technologically-advanced nations have gathered to hear what they have to say.
"The problem is solar storms—figuring out how to predict them and stay safe from their effects," says ILWS Chairperson Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters. "We need to make progress on this before the next solar maximum arrives around 2013."
The sun and Earth are separated by 93 million miles of space—a seemingly safe distance. But since the Space Age began, and especially in recent years, there has been a growing realization that 93 million miles really isn't so far apart. Spacecraft and ground-based observatories have shown that Earth is located in the sun's outer atmosphere, buffeted by solar winds and pelted by hail storms of energetic particles. Moreover, the two bodies are actually connected by invisible threads of magnetism. During "reconnection events," which typically happen several times a day, you can trace invisible lines of force all the way from Earth's poles to the surface of the sun.
"The Earth and sun are interconnected. We cannot study them separately anymore," says Guhathakurta.
A few years ago, scientists coined the term "heliophysics" to describe the emerging science of the sun-Earth system. As a nod to the importance of the topic, NASA has set up a dedicated Heliophysics Division at HQ in Washington DC, and the United Nations declared 2007 the "International Heliophysical Year" (IHY) in hopes of spurring global involvement in this new field.
