Early testing of Surya showed it could predict some solar flares two hours in advance. “It can predict the solar flare’s shape, the position in the sun, the intensity,” says Juan Bernabe-Moreno, an AI researcher at IBM who led the Surya project. According to Harra, the hidden patterns underlying events like solar flares are hard to understand from Earth. However, Bernabe-Moreno is excited for the potential beyond predicting solar flares. “There is some evidence about solar weather influencing lightning, for example,” he says.