Powerful solar superflares, which can generate geomagnetic storms and disrupt radio communications and GPS, damage satellites and endanger astronauts and even airline passengers, just got a lot easier to predict, thanks to a new formula based on half a century of X-ray observations of the Sun.
The new findings could have immediate implications in the real world. NASA’s Artemis 2 astronaut missions around moon has been pushed back until early April at the earliest to resolve problems with the rocket, but Victor M. Velasco Herrera of the National Autonomous University of Mexico believes it should be delayed even longer.
Superflares, as the name suggests, are the most powerful flare that the sun can let loose, with its radiation mainly in the X-ray bands. But because we don’t understand what triggers them well enough, it’s currently impossible to predict exactly when and where on the Sun a superflare will occur.
“Traditional solar forecasting struggles with these extreme events because they happen so quickly and unpredictably,” Velasco Herrera said.
The next best thing is to look for similar properties in the solar environment that can lead to longer periods when the chance of a superflare occurring increases greatly.
Velasco Herrera’s multinational team of solar physicists studied 50 years of data from Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) that monitored the Sun in X-rays between 1975 and 2025. They found that the timing of superflares and the regions of the Sun from which they erupted correlate with an unknown period of two.1 unknown periods of two.7. year and the other with a period of seven years. These cycles are related to the build-up of magnetic energy in certain areas.
This has given Velasco Herrera’s team the ability to predict when the peak season is for super flare. They found that we are currently in one, which began in mid-2025 and will run until mid-2026, focusing on the Sun’s southern hemisphere between 5 and 25 degrees south of the solar equator.
This is why Velasco Herrera recommends delaying the Artemis 2 mission until the second half of this year. By flying to the moonthe four astronauts will be outside the Earth’s protective magnetic envelope and will therefore be more vulnerable to solar storms. If they leave Earth in April, as NASA wants them to do, during this period of increased superflare activity, they will be at greater risk of extreme radiation exposure.
The next period of increased superflare activity after that is predicted to begin in early 2027 and run until the middle of that year, with the hotspot predicted to be the band between 10 and 30 degrees north of the solar equator.
“Our method gives space weather operators and satellite managers one to two years of advance notice of when conditions are most dangerous,” Velasco Herrera said. “This critical lead time allows them to prepare and protect communications systems, power grids and astronaut safety.”
As it happened, the team’s prognostication skills had already been put to the test without them realizing it. At the end of 2025, after they had submitted the research paper for publication, new data came from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter mission was released detailing analysis of four superflares that occurred on the opposite side of the Sun to Earth in May 2024.
These superflares matched the pattern of cycles seen in the 50-year data set that Velasco Herrera’s team uses for forecasting.
“We created our forecast without knowing about these superflares on the other side,” Velasco Herrera said. “When they were discovered during our review process, they perfectly matched our predicted patterns.”
The findings promise to be a major step toward protecting astronauts, our infrastructure in space, and the communications and energy network on Earth from solar storms that could strike our planet, and also sparkle beautifully northern lights shows.
The research was published on 13 February 2026 in Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.
