Radio ’screams’ from the Sun warn of radiation storms

ESA’s SOHO has helped uncover radio screams that foretell dangerous Coronal Mass Ejections, or CMEs, which produce radiation storms harming infrastructure on ground, in space as well as humans in space.

Dr. Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt and his team compared observations from both SOHO and Wind and looked at 472
CMEs between 1996 and 2005 that were fast and covered a large area of the sky.

They discovered that those CMEs which generated a radio signal also produced radiation storms, but CMEs without a radio signal did not.

Strong CME shocks accelerate electrons in the solar wind, which in turn produce the radio signal. The same strong shock must also accelerate atomic nuclei in the solar wind, which produce the radiation storm, according to the team.

Full ESA article at
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMOPF9RR1F_index_0.html