this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
39 points (100.0% liked)
Space
7287 readers
1 users here now
News and findings about our cosmos.
Subcommunity of Science
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How are they making predictions five days in advance when all the public info I've been able to obtain from NWS only goes out three days and is usually not very accurate?
They’re guessing, and no doubt fishing for clicks.
X-rays from flares travel at the speed of light and hit us in about 8 minutes. Solar energetic particles (related to flares) take minutes to hours. A coronal mass ejection usually takes about 3 days. At the moment we have no way of predicting them before they happen, so X-ray flares have no early warning because nothing is faster than the speed of light. We can see a CME erupt and know if it’s heading our way.
There are a couple of good sized sunspots at the moment that are facing towards us so the chances of something happening are decent, but we don’t know if and when and how much.