Researchers have designed innovative models to witness how shocks related to CMEs, or coronal mass ejections, transmits from the Sun. This is an effort made achievable only by merging information from 3 satellites of NASA to create a much more vigorous mapping of a CME than anyone can do single-handedly.

Similar to how the ships create a bow waves while they travel on the water, CMEs start out interplanetary shocks when they explode at extreme speeds from the Sun, forcing a wave of particles having high energy. These particles can ignite weather events in the space in the region of Earth, endangering astronauts and spacecraft.

Recognizing structure of a shock (specifically how it accelerates and develops) is the solution to guessing how it may disturb space near Earth. But without a huge collection of sensors distributed all over the space, these things are impracticable to calculate directly. In its place, researchers depend upon models that employ observations of the CME by satellite to replicate the resulting behavior of the shock.

The researchers working on this project are Angelos Vourlidas, the APL astrophysicist, and Ryun-Young Kwon, a solar physicist at Johns Hopkins University APL (Applied Physics Laboratory) in Maryland and George Mason University in Virginia. They pulled calculations of 2 separate explosions from 3 spacecraft: twin STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory), satellites of NASA and SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) of ESA/NASA. One CME exploded in February 2014 and the next early in March 2011.

The researchers combined the data of CME with their models. One model is dubbed as the “croissant” model for the nascent shocks’ shape, and the other is dubbed as the “ellipsoid” model for the expanding shocks’ shape. They used the models to expose the trajectory as well as 3-D structure of each shock as well as CME.