A few weeks ago Australia was blessed with some breathtaking auroras, which were the result of solar flares from the sun. While these produce some pretty skies, they cause chaos to our technology due to the magnetic intensity, so expect technology like MRIs, planes and satellites to be impacted by the galactic weather event. But there is another tidbit about solar flares, they’re hard to predict.

CSIRO space weather scientist, Dr John Morgan spoke with about and why they are so dang hard to track. Solar flares are a sudden and localised enhancement in the ultraviolet and x-ray radiation emitted by the Sun. Morgan said they are caused by magnetic activity on the Sun.

“Sunspots are actually planet-sized bundles of strong magnetic fields (as strong as in MRI machines),” he said. “These sunspots are being churned by plasma flows beneath the surface of the Sun. When sunspots collide, it stresses the magnetic bundles until they snap.

This leads to solar flares and eruptions.” Tracking and predicting solar flares isn’t an easy job, Morgan said predicting them is much more uncertain than predicting conventional weather, and there are lots of reasons for this. “One big difference is an extra variable: the magnetic field of the storm.

This is both important to how the storm impacts the Earth and very difficult to measure remotely,” he said. Morgan explained another problem is that once an event happens on the sun, us mere mortals have little to no ability to track it as.