{"id":2084,"date":"2026-03-14T06:35:59","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T06:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/?p=2084"},"modified":"2026-03-14T06:35:59","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T06:35:59","slug":"volunteers-find-oddly-high-solar-flare-rates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/?p=2084","title":{"rendered":"Volunteers Find Oddly High Solar Flare Rates"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Patches of the Sun\u2019s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/1538-4357\/ae197d\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">new study about these long-lived active regions<\/a>, we now know much more about the patches where these strong magnetic fields take at least a month to decay.<\/p>\n<p>This study relied on inputs from NASA\u2019s Solar Active Region Spotter citizen science project, which asked volunteers to answer a series of questions about pairs of active region images from NASA\u2019s Solar Dynamics Observatory.<\/p>\n<p>Project leads Emily Mason (Predictive Science Inc.) and Kara Kniezewski (Air Force Institute of Technology) looked at the data and the analysis done by volunteers. They found that the long-lived active regions produce disproportionately more flares than the shorter-lived regions and are 3-6 times more likely than other active regions to be the source of the most intense kinds of solar flares. These results are a strong indication that long-lived active regions are crucial for predicting space weather and could provide critical information on magnetic fields deeper inside the Sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The Solar Active Region Spotter project is now complete, but you can learn more about the results here: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zooniverse.org\/projects\/eimason\/solar-active-region-spotter\/about\/results\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.zooniverse.org\/projects\/eimason\/solar-active-region-spotter\/about\/results<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Explore NASA Citizen Science projects you can join today to help advance our understanding of space weather: <a href=\"https:\/\/go.nasa.gov\/3ZK6nvE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/go.nasa.gov\/3ZK6nvE.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Patches of the Sun\u2019s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a new study about these long-lived active regions, we now know much more about the patches where these strong magnetic fields<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[683,684,5,685],"tags":[680,681,682],"class_list":["post-2084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-citizen-science","category-heliophysics-division","category-science","category-solar-flares","tag-citizen-science","tag-heliophysics-division","tag-solar-flares"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}