Lessons from a solar storm chaser Miho Janvier
It is almost the end of the winter,
and you’ve woken up to a cold house,
which is weird, because
you left the heater on all night.
You turn on the light.
It’s not working.
Actually, the coffee maker, the TV –
none of them are working.
Life outside also seems to have stopped.
There are no schools,
most of the businesses are shut,
and there are no working trains.
This is not the opening scene
of a zombie apocalypse movie.
This is what happened in March 1989
in the Canadian province of Quebec,
when the power grid lost power.
The culprit?
A solar storm.
Solar storms are giant clouds of particles
escaping from the Sun from time to time,
and a constant reminder that we live
in the neighborhood of an active star.
And I, as a solar physicist,
I have a tremendous chance
to study these solar storms.
But you see, “solar storm chaser”
is not just a cool title.
My research helps to understand
where they come from,
how they behave
and, in the long run,
aims to mitigate their effects
on human societies,
which I’ll get to in a second.
At the beginning of the space
exploration age 50 years ago only,
the probes we sent in space
revealed that the planets
in our Solar System
constantly bathe in a stream of particles
that are coming from the Sun
and that we call the solar wind.
And in the same way that global wind
patterns here on Earth
can be affected by hurricanes,
the solar wind is sometimes
affected by solar storms
that I like to call “space hurricanes.”
When they arrive at planets,
they can perturb the space environment,
which in turn creates
the northern or southern lights,
for example, here on Earth,
but also Saturn
and also Jupiter.
Luckily, here on Earth,
we are protected
by our planet’s natural shield,
a magnetic bubble that we call
the magnetosphere
and that you can see here
on the right side.
Nonetheless, solar storms
can still be responsible
for disrupting satellite
telecommunications and operations,
for disrupting navigation
systems, such as GPS,
as well as electric power transmission.
All of these are technologies
on which us humans rely more and more.
I mean, imagine if you woke up tomorrow
without a working cell phone –
no internet on it,
which means no social media.
I mean, to me that would be worse
than the zombie apocalypse.
(Laughter)
By constantly monitoring the Sun, though,
we now know where
the solar storms come from.
They come from regions of the Sun
where a tremendous amount
of energy is being stored.
You have an example here,
as a complex structure
hanging above the solar surface,
just on the verge of erupting.
Unfortunately, we cannot send probes
in the scorching hot
atmosphere of the Sun,
where temperatures can rise
up to around 10 million degrees Kelvin.
So what I do is I use computer simulations
in order to analyze but also to predict
the behavior of these storms
when they’re just born at the Sun.
This is only one part
of the story, though.
When these solar storms
are moving in space,
some of them will inevitably
encounter space probes
that we humans have sent
in order to explore other worlds.
What I mean by other worlds is,
for example, planets,
such as Venus or Mercury,
but also objects, such as comets.
And while these space probes
have been made
for different scientific endeavors,
they can also act like tiny
cosmic meteorological stations
and monitor the evolution
of these space storms.
So I, with a group of researchers,
gather and analyze this data
coming from different
locations of the Solar System.
And by doing so, my research
shows that, actually,
solar storms have a generic shape,
and that this shape evolves
as solar storms move away from the Sun.
And you know what?
This is key for building tools
to predict space weather.
I would like to leave you
with this beautiful image.
This is us here on Earth,
this pale blue dot.
And while I study the Sun
and its storms every day,
I will always have a deep love
for this beautiful planet –
a pale blue dot indeed,
but a pale blue dot
with an invisible magnetic shield
that helps to protect us.
Thank you.
(Applause)