This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Maria Teming. Got a minute?

Our sun has a nasty habit of spitting volatile material at us. These incredibly hot

bubbles of magnetized material are called coronal mass ejections, or

CMEs, and they can hurdle towards Earth at thousands of miles per second. If one of a CME's magnetic fields

is aligned in just the wrong way when the ejection reaches Earth,

it could cause a magnetic storm that can temporarily disrupt the planet's magnetic field.

Such a storm has the potential to wreak havoc on technologies like GPS satellites and utility

grids, messing up radio transmissions and causing blackouts.

Currently, satellites can only tease out the orientations of magnetic fields inside and approaching

CME when it's already closing it on Earth. We'd have about an hour's

notice of an impending space storm, hardly enough time for anyone to take the

necessary protective measures. But a team led by space scientist Neil Savani of NASA and the University of Maryland

have developed a new technique that might be able to give us a lot more lead time.

Their model uses observations of the CME's magnetic field orientations during the initial

eruption and as a Koreans towards Earth, which can offer clues about what those orientations

will be when they get here.

The researchers described their work in the journal Space Weather.

Zavani has already tested it out his model's predictive power on eight mass

ejections. He claimed significant improvement over current forecasting systems. At the very least, better

advance warning would give people more time to finally back up their hard

drives before the grid goes down. Thanks for the minute. For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Maria Taming.