The Fiery Lifecycle of a Massive Solar Storm Observed for the First Time

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SSolar flares can wreak havoc on Earth, disrupting radio communications, knocking out power, and causing satellites to crash. “Even signals on railway lines can be affected and change from red to green or vice versa,” explains Louise Harra of the Physical and Meteorological Observatory in Davos. “It’s really scary.”

Unfortunately, these breakouts can be difficult to predict. This is partly because, rather than lying dormant at the center of our solar system, the sun rotates on its axis once every 28 days, meaning we can only watch solar storms form on its surface for two weeks before disappearing. Or at least that was the case before the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Solar Orbiter mission in 2020.

Orbiting the sun every six months, this spacecraft monitors the far side of the Sun while researchers on Earth monitor the near side. Recently, Harra and Ioannis Kontogiannis of ETH Zurich collected data from both observation points, observing a powerful brewing solar storm, the strongest in more than 20 years, for an unprecedented 94 days. They published their findings in Astronomy and astrophysics.

Read more: “The 315-year-old scientific experiment”

“This is the longest continuous series of images ever created for a single active region: it is an important milestone in solar physics,” Kontogiannis said. With Solar Orbiter, the team was able to observe the formation of the magnetic storm, its increasing complexity, its eruption and then its disintegration.

They hope these unprecedented observations will improve the accuracy of solar storm forecasts so we can better understand them – and ultimately better prepare for them – on Earth. Although the Solar Orbiter has proven indispensable in this mission, scientists are still unable to use it to predict the severity of solar flares, but help is on the way.

“We are currently developing a new space probe at ESA called Vigil, which will be exclusively dedicated to improving our understanding of space weather,” Harra said. This spacecraft is expected to be launched in 2031.

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Main image: ESA / AOES

• Jake Currie

  Published on January 15, 2026

  Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.