Our brilliant warm star remains a mystery in many respects, despite extensive solar-powered projects emerging over the past few years such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and NASA’s / ESA’s Solar Orbiter exploring its -income to solar eclipses, corona temperatures, and heliosphere.
One of the biggest questions raised in recent decades is why the sun’s atmosphere is millions of degrees warmer than the surface. Now a recorded solar wind anomaly may help solve this condition and introduced a 7-year orbiting instrument to identify ways in which stored magnetic energy heats the atmosphere of the sunshine.
Using images from the Earth Interface Department’s Image Spectrograph (IRIS) and the Atmospheric Image Assembly (AIA), scientists at Rice University, Colorado Boulder University, and NASA’s NASA Space Flight Center have found discovered that NASA ‘s low magnetic loops are heated to millions of degrees Kelvin.
Researchers on the study have argued that heavier ions such as silicon receive favorable treatment and roast both the solar wind and the threshold area between sunflower and corona.
Within these zones, dense loops of magnetized plasma are in a stable state. Although these energetic shores are smaller and difficult to study, astrophysicists have long claimed that they have sheltered the magnet-driven equipment that emits an explosion of energy such as nanoflares .
Since its first launch in 2013, IRIS has been operating as a high-spectrum spectrometer created specifically to look at this obscure transition area. The main goal of the small researcher is to try to understand how the solar atmosphere is energized.
In a new NASA-funded research paper published last week in the online journal Nature Astronomy, researchers describe “illumination” in these reconnected loops that harbor strong names of heavier oxygen and silicon ions.
Rice solar physicist Stephen Bradshaw, lead author of Shah Mohammad Bahauddin at the laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Colorado, and NASA astronaut Amy Winebarger looked at IRIS images that uncovered details of these motion loops and find pockets of superheated plasma.
These observations helped the team to study ionic and temperature movements within the loops using the light they emit, appearing as celestial lines that will be “chemical fingerprints”. .
“It’s in the transmission lines where all the physics are printed,” Bradshaw said. “The idea was to learn how these tiny structures are heated and hopefully say something about how the corona itself is heated. This could be a ubiquitous device that works throughout the solar atmosphere. ”
Located at the hotspots were reconnection jets containing silicon ions that moved toward (blue-shift) and away from (redshift) the observer (IRIS) at distances up to 100 kilometers each diog. This particular Doppler movement was not found for lighter oxygen ions.
“The range of motion is only about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but convection on the surface of the sun affects the bends, twists and bends in their thin magnetic strands, and adds energy to the fields. magnetic that eventually heats the plasma, “Bradshaw explained.” The IRIS observations showed that a process is underway and we are reasonably certain that there is at least one response to the first part through re- magnetic connection, and the jets are a major signature. ”
Within that apparatus, the magnetic fields of the plasma strands break and reconnect at braided spots to lower energy states, releasing their stored magnetic energy. The interpolation of this dynamic process is where that plasma becomes too hot.
“We looked at the sections in these small loop structures where reconnection was taking place and measured the emission lines from the ions, especially silicon and oxygen,” he said. “We found that the celestial lines of silicon ions were much wider than that of oxygen. We had to explain. We had an eye and thought and there seems to be an ethnic process called cyclotron ion heating that is favorable for heating heavy ions over lighter ones.
“In the solar wind, heavier ions are much hotter than lighter ions. That was measured definitively. Our study shows for the first time that this is also the property of the moving region, so that could continue to run through the entire atmosphere due to the equipment we have identified, including solar corona heating, especially as solar wind is a manifestation of the corona extending to an interplanetary space. ”
Bradshaw, Bahauddin, and Winebarger are pleased that they have solved a crucial part of the chromospheric puzzle, and hope that more IRIS data will provide a deeper overview of the mysterious solar forces at work, enabling accurate global theory. in terms of the complex Solar atmosphere.