Extreme Solar Storms of October to November 2003

摘要

In recent decades, humans have come to rely on space technology for an ever-increasing variety of purposes, including human exploration of the solar system, scientific research, national defense, and commercial activities. The field of space weather seeks to understand and predict variability in the space environment. The Sun is the source of all space weather, and the origins of major space weather storms can be traced to explosive releases of magnetic energy from the solar atmosphere in the form of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). A solar flare occurs when a sudden release of energy in an active region of the solar atmosphere leads to rapid heating of a localized region of the atmosphere, and rapid acceleration of charged particles to relativistic energies. A CME involves the expulsion of large amounts of ionized plasma and magnetic field from the Sun into interplanetary space (Fig. 1). A typical CME involves the ejection of about 10(13) kg of plasma, at speeds from a few hundred km/s up to a few thousand km/s, into interplanetary space. A major scientific objective of contemporary research in solar-terrestrial physics is to understand how and why these events occur on the Sun, and how to predict their occurrence and their effects on humans in space and on technological systems both in space and on the ground.