Space Weather Forecasters Can Count on Jupiter

Abhishek writes "Space.com reports that forecasters who predict the Solar weather can rely on Jupiter now to help them see the part of the sun that is not visible due to Earth's rotation and revolution and sun's rotation along its own axis. Scientists observing the X-Ray emanating from the Jovian atmosphere theorised that those coming from the equator were related to solar activity but it is definitely not a perfect mirror; only one in every few thousand X-Ray photons get reflected. But even that is very useful in predicting the solar weather. 'We found that Jupiter's day-to-day disk X-rays were synchronized with the Sun's emissions,' said Anil Bhardwaj at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, who led a new study using data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope. Their work was detailed in Geophysical Research Letters."

Comments

Of course the information will be 1.5 hours late..

[benhocking]

Since Jupiter is about 43 light-minutes from the sun, and we're about 8 light-minutes away, the round-trip travel time (when Jupiter is on the opposite side of the sun) will be 43*2 + 8 = 94 minutes.

A lot of information we get from the sun is, naturally, only 8 minutes delayed, but I guess since solar winds travel no faster than about 750 km/s (and usually travel much slower), solar winds take more than 50 hours to reach us -- so an hour and a half delay isn't that bad.

For Half of the Time, Anyway

[CheshireCatCO]

This is only helpful for half of the time. The other half, Jupiter would be reflecting parts of the Sun that we can see because we're on the same side.

If monitoring the far side of the Sun (Don't you just *want* to say "dark side"?) really becomes important, we'd need a spacecraft in the same orbit as Earth, but on the opposite side of the Sun.