Special News In the next three to four months, the Sun’s magnetic field is expected to undergo a 180-degree “flip” that will see its magnetic north and south poles reverse positions. The warning comes from NASA, which has been monitoring solar activity, and the U.S. space agency has cautioned that it could affect storms on Earth and even disrupt satellites. During this flip, activity on the star’s surface intensifies, producing violent solar flares and coronal mass ejections that are precursors to effects that ripple across the Solar System, reaching as far as where the Voyager 1 space probe is now — more than 18 billion km away. The outer layers of the Sun consist of a soup of charged particles whose constant motion influences the alignment of the Sun’s magnetic field. There are two “winds” of such charged particles, one moving east-west and the other, north-south.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 04:38:27 +0000