Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
am_Unition · 3729 days ago · link · · parent · post: Major X-Class Solar Flare, Prepare For Auroral Activity
The latter. We can't really "see" the plasma in between the time it leaves the corona and arrives here. One of our best tools is the ACE spacecraft, which orbits around Lagrangian Point 1, about an hour upstream of us (under typical solar wind speed conditions). For a storm, we'll see it coming about 20 minutes before it hits the magnetosphere, but then it takes about another hour to propagate back through the magnetotail and send ions slamming down into the polar atmosphere... then voila, aurora.