What’s Happening?
Scientists at NASA and IBM have created a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool to study the Sun. This tool is called Surya, and it’s made to help us understand the Sun’s behavior more clearly. NASA Science+1
Why This Matters
The Sun does a lot of things that can affect us on Earth. For example:
- It sends out solar flares and solar wind. www.ndtv.com+1
- These bursts of energy can affect satellites, power grids, and communication systems. WIRED+1
By better understanding the Sun, we can better protect our technology and even astronauts.
How Surya Works
Here are the key things about how Surya was built:
- It was trained on nine years of very detailed data from Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). science.data.nasa.gov+1
- It uses a modern AI architecture called a “transformer” which helps it look for patterns in images over both space and time. WIRED+1
- It isn’t just copying data — it learns to predict what the Sun might do next, such as where a flare might happen, or how the solar wind might change. EurekAlert!+1
What Surya Can Do
- It gives better predictions of solar flares and solar activity. For example, it improved flare classification accuracy by about 16 % over older methods. militaryaerospace.com+1
- It can give earlier warnings of solar events. It has shown the ability to forecast some flares up to two hours before older models could. Space+1
- It’s open-source, meaning the code and model are available for other researchers to use and build on. IBM Newsroom+1
Why It’s A Big Deal
In simple terms: the Sun is complicated. It has magnetic fields, plasma, light at many wavelengths, and lots of changing features. Traditional methods struggled to keep up with all the data. Surya brings together massive image sets, sophisticated AI, and domain knowledge in one tool. arXiv+1
Also, having better predictions means we can plan better. For example, if we know a strong solar flare is coming, engineers can take steps to protect satellites, and power grid operators can be on alert.
What Next?
- The team hopes to expand Surya’s capabilities to include more types of data about the Sun—not just images, but magnetic field data, radiation, etc. EurekAlert!
- Other scientists can use Surya (because it’s open source) to build specialized tools for solar physics or space weather forecasting.
- Over time, the hope is that such AI tools will help us protect Earth better from solar hazards and deepen our understanding of how our star works.
The Sun is powerful and unpredictable, but new technology is helping us see it in a whole new way. With the help of artificial intelligence, NASA’s Surya model can study the Sun’s activity, predict solar flares, and give us early warnings about space weather. This not only protects our satellites and power systems but also helps scientists learn more about how our star works. As AI continues to grow, it will open even more doors for space research and make our connection with the Sun safer and smarter.