The Sun’s most complex mysteries could soon be solved thanks to artificial intelligence. On August 20, IBM and NASA announced the launch of Surya, a foundation model for the sun. Having been trained on large datasets of solar activity, this AI tool aims to deepen humanity’s understanding of solar weather and accurately predict solar flares—bursts of electromagnetic radiation emitted by our star that threaten both astronauts in orbit and communications infrastructure on Earth.
Surya was trained with nine years of data collected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), an instrument that has orbited the sun since 2010, taking high-resolution images every 12 seconds. The