What do you see as a “complex” solar storm?

Thank you very much for all your help with our solar storm research over the past year – we’ve made some good progress, thanks to you!

Some of you might have seen our project ‘Protect our Planet from Solar Storms’, which we launched back in May with the Science Museum. Here citizen scientists compared images of two solar storms, and decided which was the most complex or complicated solar storm.

Image: Screenshot of Zooniverse project ‘Protect our Planet from Solar Storms’

We have started to analyse the data from this project, and now have some interesting results, which we will share with you in the coming months (once we get them published!).

In the meantime, we would like your help…

We have used your comparisons to create a ranking of 1100 solar storms in order of complexity (see animation below). This clearly shows the characteristics of the storms seen in these images changing as they become more complex.

Animation: Subset of the solar storms which have been ranked, showing increasing complexity.

However, we have yet to work out precisely which characteristics make a solar storm “complex”. So to help us with this, we would like you to tell us what you saw as a complex solar storm; what did you look for when you decided which was the most complicated storm?

Please tell us what you see as a complex solar storm on the talk page or using this form!

Thanks again for all your help!