Savoring A Superstar with Madhulika Guhathakurta
A coronal mass ejection shapes our heliosphere.
In Netflix’s recent disaster thriller Leave the World Behind, a series of catastrophic events plague the film’s characters while on vacation. A tanker ship rams into the coastline, self-driving cars go amuck, and there’s no internet to watch that final episode of your favorite show. As local tragedies unfold, calamities occur further afield — all provoked by an unknown instigator.
Has artificial intelligence or a rogue country hacked into cyberspace? Or consider an extreme solar eruption blasting toward Earth, wreaking havoc around the globe?
Fear not too much about this latter plot, as we are living in a golden age of heliophysics. And while a 1967 solar storm nearly provoked a nuclear war, we are more advanced today in our ability to predict the temperments of our Sun and avoid any end-of-the-world scenario from severe space weather.
An Original Star Goddess
To soak in a full sense of our Sun, I spoke with NASA heliophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta. I met Madhulika in 2017 at an exploratory workshop for the Frontier Development Lab, an applied AI accelerator for space science research. Emboldened with feminine gusto, the petite powerhouse loomed large in a mostly male-dominant room of scientists and engineers. At the time, I had difficulty pronouncing her name, so I jokingly addressed her as “the star goddess.” Luckily, Lika has a sense of humor, as well as a shorter version of her name. When she embraced the nickname wholeheartedly, I ventured to ask why so few women were at the workshop. She explained that a skewed gender landscape was common in her line of work, and then offered me a savvy tip:
“Star Goddesses — now that’s a great title for a media project. You can focus on women who work in the space sciences and space industries!”
Spectacular spectacles for a superstar.
And so, the seed for this project was planted — or rather a solar flare was ignited — evidence of Lika’s kinetic energy to catalyze action from those who fall within her orbit.
Becoming A Heliophysicist
When I asked Lika what motivated her to become a “star goddess” — or specifically, a heliophysicist — she said it was serendipity. No fairytale space story inspired her career, although she remembers when her grandmother passed away, someone explained that when a person dies, they become a star.
“We are born of stars, and we return to the stars. There is nothing untrue or unscientific about that cosmic cycle. The human body contains twenty different elements made from stars. We are living stars, and when we die, we go back to the stars. Really, I’m a hardcore philosopher at heart; maybe that’s why I chose cosmology.”
Growing up in India, Lika learned within a rigid school system. Early on, she was pushed by her father to pursue fine arts and math, as she showed promise in those fields. Yet she insisted on doing science. Never mind that she was far behind in those classes since she had to learn in three different languages each time her family moved from Calcutta to Mumbai to Dehli. Eventually, Lika won the ongoing battle with her father when she was awarded a prestigious national science scholarship that financially supported her entire secondary and tertiary education.
Pursuing her Master of Science degree in Dehli, 1979.
While Lika intended to study medicine, constant flu-like allergies kept her away from the intense hours and hands-on work required of medical school. Perhaps something more theoretical, like particle physics — and where better to find some elusive particles to study for your Master’s thesis than the impenetrable sun’s core, packed with subatomic solar neutrinos made from nuclear fusion? And so began her relationship with the Sun.
Lika would have gladly stayed in India to pursue her Ph.D. at any of its premier academic institutions, but she wound up following her fiance to Canada. When the relationship fell apart, she was reeling about her next steps.
“I considered MIT and CalTech because I had friends there—but they were all guys, and at that point in my life, I was annoyed with men. I had a girlfriend at the University of Denver, and it had an astrophysics department. I applied. It was all happenstance. I didn’t even know Denver existed on the planet.”
Like the Canada guy, astrophysics fizzled out when a key faculty member at the University of Denver went on sabbatical never to return. But the ozone hole was getting scary big, so Lika delved into atmospheric physics. However, serendipity swept Lika in another direction. While she was simulating climate models using the Cray supercomputer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, a poster ad for a fellowship in solar physics caught her eye. Lika was launched on her next trajectory, studying heliophysics long before it was a defined discipline.
Heliophysics Defined
The term heliophysics is relatively new. Before 2005, NASA scientists who studied interactions between our star and planet worked within the Sun-Earth Connection Division. When a new administrator insisted on scrapping the clunky title, Lika and her colleagues conceived of the more streamlined Heliophysics Division.
“Coming up with a new name was not sufficient. We needed to integrate the separate disciplines into an interconnected whole — the Sun and how it interacts with the Earth, solar system, and interplanetary space. We had to redefine programs and create new textbooks to train the next generation.”
Our animated heliosphere. Credit: Krystofer Kim, NASA.
At the heart of heliophysics is our life-sustaining Sun, a dynamic ball of hot plasma reverberating energetic particles that twist and flow through a tangled magnetic field. Any charged particles that escape the Sun’s corona create solar winds that undulate through space at different speeds and densities. This outflow of solar wind bumps up against the less dense medium of interstellar space, forming our bubble-like heliosphere that shields our solar system from an overabundance of harmful cosmic rays.
Sometimes our steadfast star dramatically acts out, bursting a flare of radiation or ejecting a chunk of plasma that rumbles through space. Occasionally, these solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are directed toward Earth, messing with our magnetosphere. For the most part, the Earth’s magnetic field deflects these incoming solar storms that slide off the globe in magnificent streaks of aurorae at the poles. Other times, solar storms directly slam into Earth, stirring up geomagnetic storms that create havoc around the globe.
Coronal Feedback Loops
A composite image of the Sun’s corona during eclipse events in 2017 and 2023. Credit: Peter Ward.
Eclipses offer scientists unique opportunities to observe the Sun’s corona, where streamers, plumes, and loops radiate their magnetic magnificence. When Lika was a graduate research fellow at NCAR in Boulder, she incorporated data collected during solar eclipses to make atmospheric models of Earth.
“That’s when I began participating in solar eclipses, and thinking about heliophysics as an applied science. I was very much a theoretical physicist, so I never in a million years thought I’d be working at NASA.”
Despite her theoretical background, Lika was hired to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 1993. She helped design scientific payloads that mission specialists would deploy from the International Space Station. These payloads collected data on our star’s corona to glean insights into the dynamics of solar wind and how it shapes our heliosphere.
Transferring to NASA Headquarters in 1998, Lika worked on STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory), her first spacecraft mission. Launched in 2006, STEREO’s twin probes capture a 3D perspective of our Sun, beaming back data to study the evolution of solar storms and the subsequent formation of space weather.
“In those days, space weather was not well understood. We were beginning to make connections—between the solar wind and interplanetary space, between the Sun and our geospace environment. Solar physics and atmospheric physics are different disciplines, so we were weaving these disciplines together and recognizing the interrelated patterns of space weather.”
In 2012, STEREO sampled an extreme space weather event. One of its probes collided with two coronal mass ejections, capturing data that revealed a solar superstorm energetically equivalent to a billion hydrogen bombs tearing through space at an atypical, extreme speed of over 2,000 kilometers per second. Had this magnetic monster hit Earth—and only a 9-day time differential kept it from doing so — much of our technological infrastructure would have experienced a meltdown in trillions of dollars and a potential series of chain reactions that could create catastrophic consequences around the world.
Geomagnetic Storms Gone Wild
The 2012 extreme weather event that just missed Earth.
Solar storms crashing into Earth and stirring up geomagnetic disturbances are nothing new. In 1859, astronomer Richard Carrington observed an intense solar flare that ripped through some hyperactive sunspots, smashing into Earth in less than a day. Compass needles went wild, disconnected telegraph systems burst into flames, and aurorae glowed all over the globe.
Geomagnetic storms continue to unleash disruptions as our technologies advance over the ages. In 1972, thousands of underwater mines accidentally detonated off the coast of Vietnam. In 1989, Quebec’s power grid system was frazzled, leaving nearly a quarter of Canadians without electricity. The Halloween storms of 2003 disrupted hundreds of flights around the globe, cut power for millions in Scandinavia, and confused space surveillance networks with controllers losing track of satellites and space debris for days.
“Our Sun is doing nothing new, but our vulnerability to technology is new. The countless satellites we depend on for almost everything can be taken out in a flash, disrupting navigation, communication, and banking systems. Our modern-day way of life is intricately connected to space weather.”
It’s not hyperbole to imagine a cascade of disasters from the aftermath of an extreme solar superstorm striking Earth. Think power grid surges, fires, and blackouts; no phone, internet, heat, or air conditioning; the jamming of radar and navigation systems; or the disruption of global supply chains affecting food and water supplies.
Space Weather Storm Troopers
As we head into the peak of our eleven-year solar maximum cycle of sunspot activity, it’s encouraging to know that scientists like Lika have pushed to make heliophysics applicable to our everyday life here on Earth.
“When we launched NASA’s International Living With A Star program in 2003, I wanted to bring together spacefaring nations to work on science that was relevant to society — to build useful, predictive models to track space weather. At first, it was an uphill battle to convince people about the seriousness of space weather. But today space weather is here to stay.”
Over the decades, space sentinels have been launched to develop early warning systems for incoming solar storms. NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) lurk at a distant fixed Lagrange point, keeping a steady eye on our Sun.
Should our star blast out a series of potent solar flares and CMEs toward Earth, we’ll now have a few hours to about 15 minutes to respond. These forecasting timeframes should improve by the end of this decade when the European Space Agency (ESA) launches Vigil, a spacecraft that will provide fast streaming data to forewarn us of any nasty, incoming space weather within five days.
Scientists are further apprised of space weather from the multiple space probes that orbit our Sun. In 2021, six different spacecraft from three space agencies —NASA, ESA, and Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — captured a CME that spewed out an extensive, high-speed solar storm. Data from these orbiters supplied scientists with a wide swath of space weather data to plug into their predictive models so that we can better understand our heliosphere.
Watch daily downloaded movies from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory. Choose any date at any wavelength, and voila, a gorgeous close-up of a superstar!
And now heliophysicists can add AI to the mix. NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) is a space weather sentinel that sits in a geosynchronous orbit above Earth. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft’s sensors measure multiple facets of our Sun’s structures in assorted wavelengths of light. In 2014, one of the spacecraft’s three telescopes malfunctioned due to a damaged sensor. While its other sensors still supply data, critical measurements of our Sun’s radiation are missing, impeding predictions of incoming space weather that adversely impacts our ionosphere and its satellite inhabitants. However, during the 2018 Frontier Development Lab (FDL)—the research accelerator where I first met Lika — an interdisciplinary team trained AI on the continuous data supplied by the Solar Dynamic Observatory’s two operational telescopes to recreate data that would have been collected by its third damaged telescope.
“The team fixed the sensor in just eight weeks with AI. It was like sending an astronaut, like John Grunsfeld, to go and fix the Hubble Telescope. We can deploy this benchmark dataset within the SDO mission. That’s the real return on investment, creating an AI toolbox for more applied science.”
The Frontier Development Lab takes on a multitude of challenges each year, formulating and building algorithms to problem-solve research gaps in different fields of Earth and space science. Researchers have devised AI models for predicting floods and wildfires on Earth, mapping lunar hazards for robotic Moon missions, or assessing cancer risks for long-term mission astronauts.
Dubbed with the title Heliospace Horizons, this year’s FDL sprint focuses solely on tackling the complexities of space weather as shaped by our star. Research teams will feed data into algorithms to enhance models that predict geomagnetic storms on Earth, thermospheric drag on satellites in Earth’s orbit, solar radiation exposure on the Moon, and extreme ultraviolet radiation on Mars and beyond.
While the FDL is a collaborative process of bright-minded researchers brought together through a multitude of public-private partnerships, this year’s catchphrase that reminds us We Are Living Inside a Star makes me suspect Lika shines at its center, serenely steering the next generation of heliophysicists.