A new study has revealed an unexpected link between solar storms and the flux of high-energy cosmic rays arriving at Earth. The findings, made using one of the world’s largest cosmic ray detectors, could open up a new way to probe the magnetic structures inside solar storms—and potentially improve our ability to forecast their effects on Earth. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
Earth’s magnetic field is constantly being bombarded by energetic charged particles, originating from two very different sources. While some of these particles are cosmic rays, which come toward Earth from all directions across the galaxy, the rest originate from solar storms: violent outbursts from the sun that hurl vast clouds of magnetized plasma into space.
So far, the effects of these two phenomena have often been treated as independent. Although scientists have long known that solar storms can reduce the number of lower-energy cosmic rays reaching Earth by trapping them in the storm’s twisted magnetic fields, higher-energy cosmic rays were thought to be too energetic to be affected. At these energies, the particles were expected to punch straight through the magnetic structures without being deflected.
