Can We Really Prepare For A Massive Solar Storm? — FULL DOCUMENTARY

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Technology underpins everything we do. How we navigate, communicate, and work. It controls the systems that power our world. But there's a threat that could shut it all down. Solar storms. Huge eruptions of charged particles from the sun that hurtle towards Earth at 5 million kilometres per hour. A direct hit could prove disastrous. [00:00:46] Speaker 2: Our satellites aren't going to work. We're not going to have the GPS positioning. We're not going to have our phones. ATMs are not going to be working. Our paywave devices are not going to be working. [00:00:56] Speaker 1: We've never been more vulnerable. [00:00:59] Brett Carter: Ultimately, we won't know until we actually cop one of these nasty ones. [00:01:04] Speaker 4: Trying to think ahead, trying to plan ahead, trying to understand how we can mitigate these potential natural disasters is actually really critical. [00:01:13] Speaker 1: So scientists across the globe are racing to understand more about solar storms. Measuring their effects in the intensity of the aurora. [00:01:28] Brett Carter: The aurora is amazing. I'm getting goosebumps even just talking about it. [00:01:34] Speaker 1: Looking for early warning signs from the Malaysian islands. [00:01:40] Speaker 5: An increased amount of sunspot can give an early indication that something bad is coming onto our way. [00:01:45] Speaker 1: And tracking and approaching storm using radio telescopes in the outback. [00:01:52] Speaker 4: Yeah, so what we're looking at here is really the future of radio astronomy. It was built specifically to go where no other radio telescope has gone before. [00:02:02] Speaker 1: Decoding its destructive power in time to protect ourselves. [00:02:08] Speaker 2: Understanding these huge events with any certainty is one of the great problems of astrophysics. [00:02:14] Speaker 1: Vigilantly watching for a warning from space. It's dusk at Perth airport. The first passengers are arriving for a very special flight. [00:02:39] Speaker 6: This flight is about the journey, not the destination. [00:03:02] Speaker 1: Among the excited fliers is space scientist Brett Carter. [00:03:07] Brett Carter: We're located at Perth here. And we're going to be flying down towards the south. Our geographic pole is located here. But our magnetic pole is closer to here. And so the aurora actually occurs in an oval around the magnetic pole. So we're essentially flying all the way to Antarctica pretty much tonight. And we're going to get to see the aurora face to face and then fly all the way back. [00:03:32] Speaker 1: Astronomers, astrophotographers and the plane curious are off to get a glimpse of the southern lights. One of the most spectacular celestial light shows seen on earth. [00:03:43] Speaker 7: This is the thing, I've always seen those nice colours when you get that high intensity stuff. [00:03:48] Speaker 1: Its official name is the aurora australis. [00:03:56] Speaker 7: Aurora australis is the same as aurora borealis, but this is the southern version. It's a storm, an electromagnetic storm. It's quite a spectacular thing and it has a big sort of life changing cosmic meaning to people as well. Just to see them. Everybody says they're amazing. It should be a wonderful, wonderful experience. [00:04:23] Speaker 1: For Brett, the aurora is more than a tourist attraction. It tells him how the sun is affecting our atmosphere. [00:04:35] Brett Carter: So the aurora is a natural emission of light that takes place from our earth's upper atmosphere. This is ultimately an indicator of the level of activity in the near earth space environment in terms of the interactions between the sun and the earth. [00:04:48] Speaker 1: These interactions, known as space weather, are the direct result of changes on the sun's surface. [00:04:55] Speaker 8: So what I was hoping for is actually having this coronal hole that's been poking around. We might actually have a little bit of increase in solar wind speed as a result of that. [00:05:06] Speaker 1: Instability on the surface of the sun means brighter auroras here on earth. It should be good fun. It can even hint that something far more destructive is brewing. The beginnings of a solar storm. But tonight's travellers are hoping for a magical display. [00:05:27] Brett Carter: The aurora is amazing. It's one of these natural phenomenon that you don't necessarily get to see that often. But when you do, it's like seeing a solar eclipse. It's just, yeah, it takes... I'm getting goosebumps even just talking about it. So I'm absolutely rapt and can't wait. [00:05:44] Speaker 1: Ahead is an 11-hour round trip. We'll find out later what kind of light show they're in for. So what's the difference between solar activity that causes harmless aurora and something more worrying? What exactly is a solar storm? Although scientists have been observing the surface of the sun for centuries, it wasn't until the 1970s that they really began to understand its underlying physics. Solar physicist Hannah Schunker studies the dynamic forces at the heart of our sun that lead to solar storms. [00:06:51] Speaker 2: The sun is enormous. 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun. [00:06:59] Speaker 1: Although it's mostly hydrogen gas, the sun makes up 99.8% of our solar system's entire mass. And this creates enormous internal forces. [00:07:12] Speaker 2: The mass of the sun is so large that the force of gravity at the centre causes pressure that's so high that it can fuse hydrogen. And when this hydrogen is fusing, it releases energy. But this can also release electrons. And these charged particles are then free within the gas of the sun. And this is what we call a plasma. [00:07:36] Speaker 1: This plasma continuously escapes the sun in a relatively harmless stream called the solar wind. But a storm is a sudden burst of these energised particles and is far more destructive. The key to its creation is the way plasma moves inside the sun. [00:08:05] Speaker 2: The plasma is a charged gas. And when these charges move, they create a current which can create a magnetic field. And this magnetic field is deep inside the sun. We don't know how it gets to the surface. And it rises in these loops. And these loops penetrate the surface and we see these sunspots. There are beautiful arcs that extend up into the atmosphere. Now, if the dynamics of the magnetic field at the surface cause the magnetic field in the atmosphere to touch, this can cause a process called magnetic reconnection. And this results in huge explosions of energy such as solar flares, which can be observed as a bright flash of light. [00:08:48] Speaker 1: These flares don't always affect us here on Earth, but can go hand in hand with the much more damaging burst of charged particles in a solar storm. Scientists call them coronal mass ejections or CMEs. [00:09:05] Speaker 2: Even more explosive are coronal mass ejections. And these happen higher up in the atmosphere and are really quite large in terms of the size of the sun. And can release huge amounts of energy, including energetic particles and the magnetic field itself. [00:09:25] Speaker 1: A coronal mass ejection pointed in our direction poses the greatest threat. And in the next few years, that's going to be increasingly likely. [00:09:37] Speaker 2: The sun goes through cycles that are about 11 years long in period. At the moment, we're just coming into cycle 25. In about five years time, we should reach the maximum of solar cycle 25. And this is when we have much more solar activity. [00:09:55] Speaker 1: That means a greater chance of solar storms. So will we get any sort of warning signs? The first clue we get can be seen on the surface of the sun itself. To observe the sun, you need sunshine and plenty of it. [00:10:41] Speaker ?: The first clue is that the sun has to be seen on the surface of the sun. [00:10:42] Speaker 1: And that's why the Malaysian island of Langkawi, on the Earth's equator, is a solar astronomer's paradise. [00:10:58] Speaker 5: Solar astronomy is about tracking the events across the surface of the sun. So here, being an equatorial country, we, on average, will get around 12 hours of daylight, every day. [00:11:18] Speaker 1: Daniel Osman and Kazaman Ahmad use those long daylight hours to search for dark patches on the solar surface. [00:11:27] Speaker ?: Sunspots are areas of cooled plasma. [00:11:32] Speaker 1: The result of increased magnetic activity that sometimes leads to solar storms. [00:11:42] Speaker 5: Oh, the sky is quite clear. [00:11:44] Speaker 1: Today, they're hoping to track a sunspot picked up a week ago that has been dangerously active. [00:11:52] Speaker 5: Here, we have five telescopes that allow us to observe different aspects of the sun in different wavelengths of light. [00:12:01] Speaker 1: The spot they're looking for has already unleashed a small coronal mass ejection directly towards Earth. [00:12:09] Speaker 5: So this one, observed in white light, which is how we all see the sun, and it's best for seeing the dark spots. [00:12:17] Speaker 1: The concern is, it could evolve into something even larger. But they're struggling to get a clear view. [00:12:28] Speaker 5: Today, we got a sunspot. However, the image is not as clear as we want it to be, because there is a cloud is moving in, into the frame, so we can see like tiny waves moving across the screen right now. [00:12:42] Speaker 1: When the clouds finally part, a substantial dark spot is revealed. [00:12:52] Speaker 9: They use digital sensors and image enhancement to get a clear picture. But it takes a trained eye to work out whether it's still a threat. [00:13:23] Speaker 5: It is still the most reliable method to do the sunspot. Because humans generally are good at recognizing parents and grouping the sunspot together. Because sometimes, the classification can be tricky. So as you can see from the image, we have one very big sunspot, accompanied by a few small sunspots. So in this case, we will put it in an H category. [00:13:57] Speaker 1: An H category is the classification given to a sunspot decreasing in activity. What's left of a much bigger event. So it's unlikely to unleash another solar storm. [00:14:12] Speaker 5: It is a part of normal sun cycle. However, an increased amount of sunspot can give an early indication that something is going on up there, whether it's a CME or solar flares or something bad that is coming onto our way. [00:14:30] Speaker 1: Reading signs on the solar surface is a key tool astronomers use to gauge how active the sun is becoming. But we can also see evidence of its activity right here on Earth. In the form of auroras. It's seven hours since Brett and his fellow passengers left Perth. Over Antarctica, they finally get to see what they came for. [00:15:13] Speaker 10: This is out on the left, what we're seeing is some of the best new equipment tonight. [00:15:22] Speaker 1: The southern lights. Hi. It's amazing. I can actually see the green. And tonight's display is just a fraction of how grand it can be. The sun's color are created by charged particles from the sun, colliding with oxygen and nitrogen atoms high above the Earth. They get more intense as the sun gets more active. That's a good one. [00:16:19] Speaker 8: That's a good one. [00:16:21] Brett Carter: That was a little mini-substorm. That was a good one. [00:16:28] Speaker 1: It's all happening in a part of our atmosphere called the ionosphere. [00:16:33] Brett Carter: So the ionosphere is a shell of charged particles around the Earth that sits at about 80 kilometers to about 800 kilometers altitude. Effectively, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space. [00:16:50] Speaker 1: It's our ionosphere that takes the full brunt of solar weather. And where solar storms unleash their incredible power. But the bombardment of charged particles does far more than create aurora. It impacts and disrupts our modern world all the time. To understand how, we're heading back down to Earth. Much of our technology depends on satellites thousands of kilometers above Earth. Our devices connect to them by passing radio signals through the ionosphere. If it's calm and still, there's no problem. [00:17:46] Brett Carter: It helps to think of the ionosphere a bit like this lake. Both the ionosphere and this lake have waves in it. In addition to that, the way light actually enters the surface of the lake, it bends a little bit. And you can see the bottom, but also, too, there's reflections off of its surface. The ionosphere does this in a similar way, but with radio waves. Some radio waves actually go out into space and others actually reflect off the ionosphere and bounce back down to the Earth. And this enables very long distance over-the-horizon communications. [00:18:20] Speaker 1: When the ionosphere is undisturbed, radio waves travel through like light passes through calm water. But the more it's hit by charged particles from the sun, the choppier things get. [00:18:36] Brett Carter: Basically, I can simulate that with my oar by making lots of turbulence, lots of waves, lots of splashing, making it very difficult to see through down to the bottom. In addition to that, it also makes any reflections off of the surface more complicated. Any sort of radio signals and radio communications could be actually significantly impacted by a hugely disturbed ionosphere. [00:18:58] Speaker 1: Because we're constantly bombarded by the solar wind, the ionosphere ripples all the time. And these waves can have a damaging effect on technologies we rely on. It's why experts like Brett keep a close watch on what's happening in the Earth's upper atmosphere. [00:19:26] Brett Carter: So, I'm setting up here a GPS receiver. [00:19:29] Speaker 1: GPS is a technology we've all come to depend on. [00:19:43] Brett Carter: This, like any other GPS receiver, actually listens for the signals emitted by the GPS satellites. And because they're coming from 20,000 kilometres altitude, those signals pass all the way through the ionosphere and are received here. And this is, I guess, equivalent to looking through down to the bottom of the lake, so to speak. [00:20:03] Speaker 1: For GPS to work accurately, it requires clear communication between the ground and space. And in industries like aviation, precision is vital. Aircraft landing systems rely heavily on correct readings, but can be badly thrown out by turbulence in the ionosphere. So, fluctuations are being constantly monitored and adjusted for. [00:20:31] Brett Carter: A receiver like this set up at an airport is actually able to correct for any variations in the ionosphere and then broadcast those corrections to the aircraft, allowing them to go from tens of metres of inaccuracy down to less than one metre. [00:20:45] Speaker 1: Our systems are now able to compensate for the daily disturbances that space weather causes. But they have never been tested to their limit. [00:21:00] Brett Carter: Each one of the dots here is representing one of the stations around the world. So, lots of industries and applications are able to regularly account for these types of variations. During a really severe geomagnetic storm, the changes just go completely haywire. We can try and model for it and try and compensate for it, but ultimately we won't know until we actually cop one of these nasty ones. [00:21:23] Speaker 1: There hasn't been a big enough storm since the digital revolution to understand the scale of its potential effects. Although history does provide one example of just how frightening it can get. It's the benchmark by which all solar storms are measured. The largest coronal mass ejection ever recorded. Known as the Carrington event. [00:22:04] Speaker 2: This sketch was made in 1859 by a solar astronomer named Richard Carrington. We've seen this in 1859 by a solar storm. [00:22:11] Speaker ?: We've seen this in 1859. [00:22:11] Speaker 2: We've seen this in 1859. [00:22:12] Speaker ?: We've seen this in 1859. [00:22:12] Speaker 2: We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. [00:22:16] Speaker ?: We've seen this in 1859. [00:22:16] Speaker 2: We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. We've seen this in 1859. There would have been an enormous amount of energy for it to be that visible. [00:22:32] Speaker 1: The aurora it created could be seen from the Rocky Mountains to northern Queensland. It even made global headlines. [00:22:44] Speaker 11: A splendid exhibition of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, took place on Sunday evening. They were so brilliant that they gave rise to the rumour of a large fire. [00:22:57] Speaker 1: Electric currents created by a flood of charged particles knocked out telegraph networks. The internet of its day. Operators received severe electrical shocks. Papers in telegraph offices caught fire. Telegraph machines disconnected from their batteries continued to work using just the electricity surging through the air. And then, a century and a half later, it looked like history was repeating itself. [00:23:26] Speaker 2: In 2012, there was a large coronal mass ejection from the sun. Luckily for us, this was not directed towards Earth. But it had the equivalent amount of energy as the Carrington event. If that was directed towards Earth, we would have been in a lot of trouble. [00:23:45] Speaker 1: It's thought that had the 2012 storm hit Earth, it would have caused around $2 trillion worth of damage by disrupting communications and infrastructure. As we rely more and more on technology, that potential for damage is only likely to increase. What causes this devastation are ions, the name given to the charged particles that make up a solar storm. They deluge our atmosphere, creating powerful electrical currents. But they're invisible, a shower of particles too tiny to see. But the energy they release can be visualised using a microwave and a single grape. [00:24:57] Speaker 2: So let's slice a grape in half. Just place it on the dish there with the two halves just touching. Place them into the microwave. Set this for 10 seconds. [00:25:26] Speaker 12: Wow. Cool. Yoo-hoo! [00:25:33] Speaker 1: This tiny eruption is a scaled down version of the energy released by ions reacting with our atmosphere. [00:25:43] Speaker 2: So here we have our smoking grapes. So what's happened here is that the microwaves have the same wavelength as the size of the grape. When the microwaves enter the grape, they get trapped inside and they build up a resonance. Where the grapes are touching, the energy is focused there and this ionises the salt in the grape. This then excites the oxygen in the air and this creates a plasma. I want to do it again. [00:26:13] Speaker 1: The huge mass of ions in a solar storm creates explosive spikes of energy. And that is where the threat to our technology lies. But we're not completely unprotected. The Earth has its own natural defences. The magnetosphere. [00:26:36] Speaker 2: The magnetosphere of the Earth is the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth and acts like a magnetic shield. So it can protect us from interplanetary magnetic fields and the charged particles from the solar wind. [00:26:51] Speaker 1: Usually the magnetosphere fends off the stream of solar material. [00:26:58] Speaker 2: On the side of the Sun, when the solar wind comes in, it sort of squashes the magnetic field on one side of the Earth. And then on the far side, by deflecting the charged particles around the Earth, we get a long tail on the nighttime side of the Earth. And so this can generate the beautiful aurora that we observe when the charged particles are transported by the magnetic field down into our atmosphere and closer to the surface. So if the solar wind is like a stiff breeze, then a coronal mass ejection is like hurricane force winds. [00:27:38] Speaker 1: The force of a solar storm with its own magnetic field distorts Earth's magnetosphere. And slingshots a mass of electrified particles into our atmosphere. [00:27:54] Speaker 2: So these charged particles are going to interact with anything electronic or anything that can conduct charge. So this includes long pipelines such as fuel pipelines or water pipelines. It also includes satellites in the atmosphere, your personal electronic equipment, as well as a huge concern is power stations and power lines. [00:28:22] Speaker 1: This frenzied spike of electromagnetic activity is called a geomagnetic storm. So just how seriously do we take their threat? Here in Australia, it's something we've been concerned about for some time. [00:28:39] Speaker 6: The sun's image can be viewed by the operator on twin television tubes. A pair of pictures is taken each second. Routine space weather forecasts began as early as the 1940s. [00:28:49] Speaker ?: This is one of our best photographs. It shows a small sunspot and surrounding disturbances. Scientists increased their monitoring of solar activity during World War Two. This is one of our best photographs. It shows a small sunspot and surrounding disturbances. Scientists increased their monitoring of solar activity during World War Two. This is one of our best photographs. This is one of our best photographs. [00:28:55] Speaker 1: It shows a small sunspot and surrounding disturbances. Scientists increased their monitoring of solar activity during World War Two. [00:29:04] Speaker ?: When it was linked to interference on vital waves. [00:29:07] Speaker 13: This is one of our best photographs. It shows a small sunspot and surrounding disturbances. [00:29:13] Speaker 1: Scientists increased their monitoring of solar activity during World War Two. When it was linked to interference on vital radio communications. But now we're looking at even more far reaching effects. Ones that require emergency planning. On the front line of warning us about incoming storms. Is space weather forecaster Richard Marshall. [00:29:50] Speaker 14: This is the Bureau's Space Weather Centre. [00:29:54] Speaker 1: With an array of feeds from observatories on Earth and in space. He's constantly on the lookout for the next big solar outburst. [00:30:04] Speaker 14: Across these screens we're looking at essentially some satellite imagery. That gives us viewing of the solar atmosphere, the outer atmosphere of the sun. And we're looking for coronal mass ejections. The disk in the centre darkens the bright light from the sun. So that we can actually image the solar outer atmosphere. So in this sort of imagery they would look at, look like a, a puff of, or a cloud of white smoke. A puff of smoke for example. [00:30:35] Speaker 1: Images like this come from one of the many missions in space currently watching the sun. They are observing it in different wavelengths. Monitoring its magnetic activity. And in the case of the recent Parker probe. Collecting data from the sun's surface itself. All giving us a warning of an approaching storm. [00:31:02] Speaker 14: For a coronal mass ejection we would probably have at least 12 hours notice before it arrives at Earth. Some of the fastest travel times on records are around the 14 hours. And that's moving very quick. They're moving at millions of kilometres an hour. [00:31:17] Speaker 1: So we have 12 hours to make major preparations. But it's not until the storm gets much closer to Earth that we know how severe it is. For that, we only get an hour's notice. [00:31:30] Speaker 14: This is taken from a satellite called Discover. It sits about 1.5 million kilometres upstream towards the sun. So that means it's between the sun and the Earth. It's monitoring incoming events from the sun. It's providing us with about a 60 minute warning of when it's going to impact the Earth. [00:31:56] Speaker 1: As it passes the Discover satellite, we'll get details of where it will hit and the damage it'll do. All the while, airlines will be adjusting flight plans. Communication companies tweaking satellite orbits. And the power grid putting in measures to reduce the chance of blackouts. If our technology still goes dark, we might need to make our own preparations. And in ways we've probably never thought about. Hannah's getting solar storm ready by stocking up on a few vital supplies. [00:32:57] Speaker 2: Here we have a solar survival shopping list. This is in the case of a potential solar storm, some of the items we might need. First on the list is something called a Faraday cage. [00:33:12] Speaker 1: A Faraday cage is the name given to a metal lined container used to protect sensitive technology from electromagnetic energy. [00:33:22] Speaker 2: Okay, this is it. Very unassuming, but let's go see. [00:33:27] Speaker 1: It is something we might need during the energetic deluge of a solar storm. [00:33:33] Speaker ?: Good morning. My name's Hannah. [00:33:35] Speaker 2: Hi Hannah, I'm Mandy. Nice to meet you. I have a shopping list here that I hope you can help me out with. [00:33:40] Speaker ?: Yes. [00:33:41] Speaker 2: Do you store Faraday bags or some Faraday material? [00:33:44] Speaker ?: I do. I do, yes. [00:33:46] Speaker 12: Yes. Just follow me. Quite a full range of Faraday products. This one here is used to put mobile phones in, batteries. You can put things like a compass in here. It has a special lining on the inside as you can see. Okay, so that's the key, is this lining here. So this is a Faraday fabric. [00:34:10] Speaker ?: Okay. [00:34:11] Speaker 12: Faraday fabric is made out of a, like a unique composition of metals, which blocks signals. [00:34:19] Speaker 1: When Michael Faraday, one of the 19th century's most influential scientists, invented his famous cage, he kind of imagined it would take on quite so many forms. [00:34:35] Speaker 12: What are the practical uses for these? We have a lot of government industries that are, that are using them. Um, we supply to the military. So it's predominantly data storage to secure, for secure data. Secure, yeah, secure data. [00:34:53] Speaker 1: Because large solar storms can affect the power supply, we're going to need something to keep the lights on. [00:35:01] Speaker 2: So we're going to need a battery, and we're going to need something to charge the battery if our power is not working. [00:35:07] Speaker 1: But it's not the only outage we'll have to deal with. [00:35:11] Speaker 2: Our satellites aren't going to work, we're not going to have the GPS positioning, we're not going to have our access to Google Maps or our phones. [00:35:19] Speaker 1: So we might have to find more traditional ways to get our bearings. [00:35:23] Speaker 2: Paper maps. I can't remember the last time I used a paper map. What's the scale on this? [00:35:30] Speaker 13: One to twenty-five thousand. That's about two kilometres. About the map there. [00:35:34] Speaker 2: OK, so I'm going to need a lot of maps if I want to travel any significant distance. [00:35:40] Speaker 1: And there's something else you might want to hand. [00:35:46] Speaker 2: Paper money. You take cash? We do. Excellent. Our ATMs are not going to be working, our paywave devices are not going to be working, and so we're going to go back to old-fashioned cash. [00:35:57] Speaker 1: Finally, you might need a distraction for your pets. Some animals rely on the Earth's magnetic field to navigate, and could be disorientated by solar storms. [00:36:13] Speaker 2: So here we have one of the last things on the list, which is a pet toy. You need to keep pets entertained. [00:36:22] Speaker 1: So to be on the safe side, it's probably best to keep the dog indoors. [00:36:27] Speaker 9: You need to keep the dog indoors. [00:36:45] Speaker 1: As prepared as we can be, we can't yet predict when solar storms will happen, or how destructive they will be, until they're almost upon us. But there might be a way to do both. Not by watching the sun, but by tuning into it. That's because the sun doesn't just emit light, it also generates radio waves. At the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, they're finishing the latest addition to a network of small radio telescopes called e-Kalisto. [00:37:49] Speaker 15: In short, we just need a few elements, especially this aluminum cylinder component here, which I asked my students to cut just now, in multiple lengths, because they represent multiple frequencies. [00:38:03] Speaker 1: This handcrafted antennae may be one of the solutions to predicting solar storms. Because they're easy to set up, even on a roof, a huge global network has sprung up, collecting data on the sun from multiple locations around the clock. [00:38:24] Speaker 15: This is the main antennae for the e-Kalisto. This is the simplest, because you just need the antennae and just an amplifier and a receiver, and then you just need your computer or your laptop. It's very, very easy to set up, and it's very cheap, but the first instrument to detect the radio wave from the sun. [00:38:49] Speaker 1: The bursts of radio waves often accompany solar flares and CMEs, but it's now thought they could also pre-empt a storm. [00:39:00] Speaker 15: So, solar radio bursts is, in a way, not as energetic as solar flare, okay? But it can also be a precursor for every energetic event that maybe can impact humans on Earth. [00:39:16] Speaker 1: Catching these weak signals is challenging. They must filter out the noise of our own telecommunications. And solar radio bursts are irregular. The strength of a global network is that it can lock onto these signals and track them as they evolve. [00:39:43] Speaker 15: So, this happened on 6 September 2017, a few years back. So, you can see solar bursts happen. Another station detects more features in the bursts. So, this is another station. So, it shows more structure. In fact, it shows double solar radio bursts. So, we're very excited about this. It's quite rare that one flare produces two bursts at the same time. [00:40:10] Speaker 1: Research suggests bursts like these might be part of a build-up to a coronal mass ejection. If so, it may be possible to predict them. [00:40:22] Speaker 15: Because looking at solar radio bursts, we still have not yet fully understood its relation to solar flare. But there have been some research going on that's leading towards some sort of prediction, okay? But that's in the future. I think it's possible. [00:40:43] Speaker 1: But even if they act as an early warning, these simple receivers won't be able to provide another crucial bit of information. So, that's exactly how destructive a storm will be. In Western Australia, 600 kilometres from Perth, scientists from Curtin University are leading the world in trying to work that out. They found a different way to use radio telescopes to reveal the hidden physics of a storm. [00:41:30] Speaker ?: So, we're leaving the sealed road now. [00:41:31] Speaker 10: All right. And it's 200 k's of unsealed road to Biladi Station. [00:41:37] Speaker ?: Mm-hm. [00:41:38] Speaker 10: And there's a couple of river crossings on the way. [00:41:40] Speaker 1: John Morgan and his team are heading out to a unique observatory. In one of the quietest places on Earth, Australia's only official radio quiet zone. [00:41:59] Speaker 4: I'm just going to pop my phone into flight mode just to make sure that it's not going to ruin anyone else's observations. [00:42:06] Speaker 1: Radio silence is needed because the instruments he uses are sensitive to even the faintest of signals. [00:42:17] Speaker 4: So, one thing that is almost unique to radio observatories is the ability to remotely sense what's happening in the solar wind of the sun. About what's happening between us and the sun, what's coming our way. [00:42:47] Speaker 1: It's this ability of radio telescopes to see the invisible makeup of a solar storm that may provide the key to tracking them as they hurtle towards Earth. After a three-hour drive across the traditional lands of the Wajari Yamaji people, they arrive at their destination. The Murchison Radio Observatory. Run by the CSIRO, it's home to several radio telescopes. But the Curtin team work with one like no other. The Murchison Wide Field Array, or MWA. [00:44:02] Speaker 4: We really hope that the measurements that we can make with the MWA can help us really pinpoint the location of a coronal mass ejection in space, figure out some of its critical properties and help us to forecast exactly when it will arrive at the Earth and what effect it might have. So how's the array looking at the moment? [00:44:35] Speaker 16: Yeah, it's looking pretty good. Almost fully functional. All right. We've got the 256 tiles more or less up and running. [00:44:45] Speaker 1: 4,096 spider-like antennae arranged in tiles see huge areas of the sky at one time. But its original purpose wasn't to look at our sun at all. [00:45:01] Speaker 4: Yeah, so this radio array was actually built with the purpose of trying to detect signals from the very early universe. So these are signals that have been travelling through the universe for over 10 billion years. [00:45:19] Speaker 1: The MWA had a unique ability to reveal the inner workings of solar storms. [00:45:33] Speaker ?: That's looking good. That's looking good. [00:45:39] Speaker 1: Like the Malaysian radio observatory, the basic antennae is simple. But the sheer scale of the operation has allowed them to build up a huge library of radio snapshots of the sky. [00:45:55] Speaker 16: We've been operating this telescope since 2013 and in that time we've produced 40 petabytes of data. So that's one of the largest scientific data collections in astronomy ever. [00:46:07] Speaker 1: This 40 million gigabyte data set creates a unique vision of the universe. [00:46:14] Speaker 4: It's still a little bit magical to me that you can take the signals from all of these individual tiles and bring them together in one place and produce a radio image of the sky. So now we're going to where the data is actually processed. That requires a lot of computers and computers actually produce radio waves. So the main thing we need to do now is actually keep those radio waves locked away. [00:47:13] Speaker 1: What the MWA reveals is a view of our universe usually obscured behind clouds of cosmic dust. [00:47:26] Speaker 4: So this is actually an optical view of the night sky. So this is what the night sky looks like essentially to your eyes or a conventional camera. You can see the Milky Way very clearly going through the middle. You don't see it perfectly. You can see what looks like black dust obscuring some of our views. So we're not actually able to see right the way through the galaxy using optical means. Now if you compare that to the radio image, now we don't see those dust lanes at all. We see right the way through and get a much clearer view of our galaxy, particularly the galactic center. We see something that looks superficially very similar to what you see with your eyes. You see these little pinpricks of light. It looks like a star field. And we're not actually looking at stars at all for the most part. What we're actually looking at is very distant galaxies. [00:48:28] Speaker 1: It was while recording the faint signals of galaxies that they detected interference. When radio emissions pass through the solar wind or a solar storm, they do something we see stars do. They twinkle. [00:48:53] Speaker 4: The sun is obviously incredibly hot. It's blowing off all of these charged particles out into space. They're moving very fast. They're moving supersonically, actually. And that will cause turbulence, just like the sort of heat haze you get off the top of a fire. The effect that it has is to make an image wobble a little bit. [00:49:16] Speaker 1: The wobbling, or twinkling, is called interplanetary scintillation. And it sounds like this. The degree to which the signal fades in and out can be used to measure how severe a solar storm is. [00:49:38] Speaker 4: When there's a large coronal mass ejection, which is launched from the sun, that's a much denser solar wind. It gives stronger interplanetary scintillation. And that would allow us to predict in advance the effect that this CME is going to have. [00:49:53] Speaker 1: With this way of forecasting, we would have details of a solar storm's severity up to three days in advance. A vast improvement on the one-hour warning we have now. But there's one more element to a solar storm we've yet to work out. And when it comes to impacting Earth, it's probably the most important of all. [00:50:38] Speaker 4: If we're to prepare in advance for a big space weather event, we know that there is a coronal mass ejection on its way. A really critical piece of the puzzle to know is actually the structure, the orientation of the magnetic field of the coronal mass ejection. Because that will really tell you the effect that the coronal mass ejection will have once it arrives at the Earth. [00:51:02] Speaker 1: It's important to know about the magnetic field of a CME. Because if its polarity is the opposite of Earth's magnetosphere, it's much more destructive. So John is working on something next level that might help solve the mystery. The Square Kilometre Array. [00:51:35] Speaker 4: Well this is actually what brought me to Australia in the first place. It's the prospect of the Square Kilometre Array. And really everything that we've been doing over the last ten years with the development of the MWA, the development of this incredible radio quiet site, has all been in pursuit of finally building the Square Kilometre Array here. There'll be 512 stations like this, compared to the 256 tiles of the MWA. We've just got a lot more metal on the ground. [00:52:04] Speaker 1: This next generation array will not only be able to detect the density of charged particles in the cloud of a coronal mass ejection, but the direction they are moving within that cloud. Revealing the all-important orientation of its magnetic field. [00:52:26] Speaker 4: There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that with that capability is going to come a lot of capability as well for studying the sun, revealing some of the things that we're currently grappling with in terms of understanding the fundamental physics of what's going on close to the sun. [00:52:45] Speaker 1: When it comes online in the late 2020s, the SKA will be part of the world's largest radio telescope. Providing us with the vital information we will need to brace for the impact of a major solar event. [00:53:06] Speaker ?: *Sounds of the wind*