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For Aditya-L1, the year 2026 will be truly unique.

This marks the initial occasion the observatory – which was placed into space last year – can watch the Sun during its maximum activity cycle.

According to research, this occurs approximately once every 11 years when the Sun's polarity reverses – the Earth equivalent would be the North and South poles swapping positions.

This period of great turbulence. It involves the Sun changing from calm to stormy and features a significant rise in the number of solar eruptions and massive solar flares – enormous clouds of plasma that erupt of the Sun's outermost layer.

Composed of ionized particles, a CME may have a mass up to a trillion kilograms and reach velocities exceeding 2,000 miles each second. It can head out in any direction, including towards our planet. At top speed, the journey takes an ejection about half a day to traverse the 150 million km Earth-Sun distance.

"During typical or quiet periods, the Sun launches two to three CMEs a day," explains an astrophysics expert. "Next year, it's anticipated them to be 10 or more each day."

Studying coronal mass ejections is one of the most important research goals of India's maiden solar mission. Firstly, as these eruptions provide an opportunity to study the star at the centre of our solar system, and two, because activities occurring on the solar surface endanger infrastructure on Earth and in orbit.

Impacts on Our Planet and Space Infrastructure

Coronal mass ejections rarely pose immediate danger to people, yet they impact our planet through generating magnetic disturbances affecting the weather in near space, where nearly thousands of spacecraft, including many from India, orbit.

"The most spectacular manifestations from solar eruptions are auroras, being a clear example that charged particles from our star are travelling to Earth," the expert clarifies.

"However, they may cause electronic systems on a satellite fail, disable power grids and affect weather and communication satellites."

Past Solar Events

• The strongest solar storm in history was the Carrington Event which knocked out telegraph lines worldwide
• In 1989, a part of Quebec's power grid failed, leaving six million people without power for hours
• During late 2015, solar activity disturbed flight operations, causing disruption in Sweden and various European air hubs
• Recently in 2022, an ejection caused dozens of spacecraft being lost

With capability to see events in the solar atmosphere and detect solar activity or solar eruption in real time, record its temperature at the source and track its path, this serves as a forewarning to switch off power grids and spacecraft and move them to safety.

Aditya-L1's Special Capability

There are other solar missions watching the Sun, Aditya-L1 holds an edge over others when it comes to watching the corona.

"Aditya-L1's coronagraph has perfect dimensions that lets it nearly mimic lunar coverage, completely blocking the solar disk permitting continuous observation of almost all of the corona 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, even during solar events," notes the researcher.

Essentially, this instrument functions as a synthetic eclipse, obscuring the Sun's bright surface allowing researchers constantly study its faint outer corona – a feat natural eclipses does only during specific moments.

Additionally, this is the only mission that can study solar events using optical wavelengths, letting it determine a CME's temperature and heat energy – key clues that show how strong of an eruption if it headed our direction.

Readiness for Peak Period

To prepare for next year's peak solar activity period, scientists worked together analyzing information gathered from a major CMEs that Aditya-L1 has observed recently.

This event began in September 2024 during early hours. Its mass totaled billions of tons – the iceberg that struck the ship was 1.5 million tonnes.

At origin, the heat reached extreme levels with energy equivalent was equivalent to millions of tons of TNT – relative to the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much smaller in scale each.

Even though these figures make it sound incredibly large, the scientist describes it as a moderate event.

The asteroid that eliminated prehistoric life on our planet carried enormous energy and during the Sun's maximum activity cycle, there may be eruptions with energy content matching even more than that.

"I consider the CME we analyzed to have occurred when the Sun of typical solar activity. Now this sets the benchmark that we'll be using assessing what is in store during solar maximum occurs," he states.

"The insights gained will help us developing protective measures to implement safeguarding satellites in near space. They will also help us gain deeper knowledge of near-Earth space," he concludes.