‘Roadrunner’ movements observed in solar flares

Oct. 25 () –

Astrophysicists have identified a phenomenon similar to the rapid movements of the Road Runner in the cartoons, which tests a 19-year-old theory about the formation of solar flares.

Understanding solar flares is important for predicting space weather and mitigating how it affects technology and human activities, explained Vanessa Polito of OSU (Oregon State University), who participated in the research. published in Nature Astronomy.

“Solar flares can release an enormous amount of energy, 10 million times greater than the energy released by a volcanic eruption,” Polito said. in a statement. “The flares and associated coronal mass ejections can generate beautiful auroras, but also severely impact our space environment, disrupting communications, posing dangers to astronauts and satellites in space, and affecting Earth’s power grid.”

Reconnections of the sun’s magnetic field lines by ‘slip’(the term was inspired by the crazy races of Coyote after the Road Runner in Loonie Tunes) were observed through NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, a satellite used to study the sun’s atmosphere.

Observation of tiny, bright features in the sun’s atmosphere moving at unprecedented speeds (thousands of kilometers per second) opens the door to a deeper understanding of the creation of solar flares, the most powerful explosions in the solar system.

Guillaume Aulanier of the Paris Observatory, a collaborator on the research, developed the slip reconnection concept in 2005.

But measuring the speed of solar flare nuclei had been difficult, Polito said. The cores are small bright regions within larger flare ribbons that mark the location of magnetic field reconnection, areas known as footholds where intense release of heat and energy occurs.

However, recently designed high-rate observing programs, which capture images approximately every two seconds, revealed sliding motions of nuclei that They move at speeds of up to 2,600 kilometers per second.

“The tiny, bright features observed by IRIS track the very fast motion of the footholds of individual magnetic field lines, which slide along the solar atmosphere during a flare,” said Polito, the deputy principal investigator of the IRIS mission.

“Flares and magnetic reconnection are phenomena that occur in all stars and in different astrophysical objects throughout the universe, such as pulsars and black holes. “On the Sun, our closest star, we can study them in great detail as our study demonstrates.”

A solar flare occurs when the Sun’s atmosphere emits a sudden, intense burst of radiation through the rapid release of built-up magnetic energy. The energy emission from a single flare is equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously and covers the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays.

The eruptions are usually associated with large ejections of plasma (gas so hot that electrons separate from the nuclei) from the solar corona, phenomena known as coronal mass ejections. A rash can last from minutes to hours.