Name: 【TED】Miho Janvier: Lessons from a solar storm chaser (Lessons from a solar storm chaser | Miho Janvier)
Uploaded: 2018-01-16T17:20:47.000Z
Duration: 5 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Transition words & phrases

which is weird, because you left the heater on all night.

Actually, the coffee maker, the TV -- none of them are working.

This is not the opening scene of a zombie apocalypse movie.

This is what happened in March 1989 in the Canadian province of Quebec,

Solar storms are giant clouds of particles

and a constant reminder that we live in the neighborhood of an active star.

I have a tremendous chance to study these solar storms.

My research helps to understand where they come from,

aims to mitigate their effects on human societies,

At the beginning of the space exploration age 50 years ago only,

revealed that the planets in our Solar System

constantly bathe in a stream of particles that are coming from the Sun

And in the same way that global wind patterns here on Earth

the solar wind is sometimes affected by solar storms

which in turn creates the northern or southern lights,

we are protected by our planet's natural shield,

a magnetic bubble that we call the magnetosphere

and that you can see here on the right side.

Nonetheless, solar storms can still be responsible

for disrupting satellite telecommunications and operations,

for disrupting navigation systems, such as GPS,

All of these are technologies on which us humans rely more and more.

I mean, imagine if you woke up tomorrow without a working cell phone --

I mean, to me that would be worse than the zombie apocalypse.

By constantly monitoring the Sun, though,

we now know where the solar storms come from.

where a tremendous amount of energy is being stored.

as a complex structure hanging above the solar surface,

in the scorching hot atmosphere of the Sun,

where temperatures can rise up to around 10 million degrees Kelvin.

So what I do is I use computer simulations

in order to analyze but also to predict the behavior of these storms

This is only one part of the story, though.

When these solar storms are moving in space,

some of them will inevitably encounter space probes

that we humans have sent in order to explore other worlds.

What I mean by other worlds is, for example, planets,

And while these space probes have been made

they can also act like tiny cosmic meteorological stations

and monitor the evolution of these space storms.

So I, with a group of researchers, gather and analyze this data

coming from different locations of the Solar System.

And by doing so, my research shows that, actually,

and that this shape evolves as solar storms move away from the Sun.

This is key for building tools to predict space weather.

I would like to leave you with this beautiful image.

And while I study the Sun and its storms every day,

I will always have a deep love for this beautiful planet --

but a pale blue dot with an invisible magnetic shield