A team of astronomers from Northern Ireland are using a powerful telescope in one of the Canary Islands to help them understand space weather and predict its effect on the earth’s climate.

Gazing through the clear skies above the Atlantic Ocean, they are able to study solar flares — events on the sun’s surface that release enormous amounts of energy, equivalent to a billion megatons of TNT, and over 10 billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.

The sun’s intertwining magnetic fields build up tremendous amounts of energy. Just like continually twisting a rubber band, energy is stored until the field lines eventually break, causing a solar flare.

These flares can cause severe electrical and communication disruptions on earth. For example, solar flares were responsible for the 1989 Hydro-Quebec blackout in which six million people in the Canadian province lost power for over nine hours, closing schools, businesses and crippling Montreal’s main airport.

A more recent event occurred in May 1998, when a flare caused contact with the communications satellite Galaxy Four to be lost, incapacitating 90% of the pager and phone networks in the USA.

Astronomers at Queen’s are aiming to understand the physics that occur in solar flares so that they can predict ‘space weather’ and its resulting effect on our environment.

Solar flares are usually observed in X-ray wavelengths and are normally studied using satellites launched by NASA and the European Space Agency, which orbit the earth. But recently astronomers in the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s have used a telescope on the 9,000 ft high mountain of La Palma in the Canary Islands to study these explosions.

Dr Mihalis Mathioudakis, the leader of the solar study, said: “Using the Swedish Solar Telescope on top of a very high, dry mountain in the middle of the Atlantic makes an enormous difference to what we can do.

“We have a small telescope on the roof of the physics building at Queen’s for students to map the sun’s surface for undergraduate projects. That’s fine for teaching, but to do world leading research, we need somewhere a bit sunnier than Belfast.”

Our measurements are the equivalent of reading the time on Big Ben from Tokyo

Another member of the group, Dr David Jess, explained their recent results: “With the fantastic atmospheric conditions in the Canaries, we’ve been able to measure what’s going on in these flares down to a size of 40 kilometres, and this is the best accuracy that anyone in the world has yet achieved.

“Bearing in mind that the sun is 150m kilometres from the earth, our measurements are the equivalent of reading the time on Big Ben from Tokyo in Japan.”

The Queen’s researchers are trying to understand why flares are so bright and what exactly is the total energy released. Their new results indicate that all solar flares not only emit X-rays but also light that our eye can see.

Professor Francis Keenan, head of the School of Maths and Physics who is also a solar physicist, said: “We don’t need to tell you that you can get a great tan or severe sunburn in the Canaries but we do need to go there to get these images, which are the most detailed pictures of the solar surface ever taken from Earth. Our ultimate goal of studying these surface explosions is to understand how they affect the Earth’s environment.”