A composite image of a coronal mass ejection as seen from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft (gold), the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (red), and the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory's K-Cor coronagraph (blue). NASA/ESA/SOHO/SDO/Joy Ng and MLSO/K-Cor

Researchers who developed the new technique used an instrument called a coronagraph, which blocks the sun's bright light and allows astronomers to see what's going on in the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere. With this tool, scientists from NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado found a way to detect SEP activity tens of minutes earlier than current forecasting techniques allow, which will ultimately help protect astronauts in space, NASA officials said a statement.

Most of the current space-weather research uses space-based coronagraphs. The new technique, by contrast, employs ground-based coronagraphs, which can deliver observations "almost instantly, and at a much higher time resolution than satellite instruments," NASA officials said.

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"With space-based coronagraphs, we get images back every 20-30 minutes," Chris St. Cyr, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "You'll see the CME in one frame, and by the time you get the next frame which contains the information we need to tell how fast it's moving the energetic particles have already arrived [at Earth]."

Solar particles released during a

The researchers' findings, published Jan. 30 in the

"Currently, processed images from K-Cor are available on the internet in less than 15 minutes after they're taken," Joan Burkepile, a study co-author based at NCAR and principal investigator for the K-Cor instrument,

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