Scientists could have found a option to investigate the curious processes that speed up solar particles to tremendous speeds.
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — huge eruptions of superheated plasma — are two of essentially the most energetic processes seen within the solar system.
Earth’s magnetic field protects us from essentially the most extreme consequences of those solar storms, but powerful flares and CMEs can still disrupt our lives. For instance, Earth-directed CMEs can spawn geomagnetic storms that disrupt power grids and communication networks. (It is not all bad, nevertheless; such outbursts also supercharge the northern lights.)
Related: Wild solar weather is causing satellites to plummet from orbit. It’s only going to worsen.
Because of this, scientists are keen to raised understand these so-called solar energetic particle (SEP) events. But investigating the underlying particle acceleration process involved in SEP events is hard.
Recent research demonstrates for the primary time that energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) — particles with no electric charge moving at incredible speeds — may very well be used to probe the acceleration process in large SEP events like CMEs and solar flares.
The brand new findings are quite relevant, as they were released during a stretch of high solar activity. Earth has been pummeled by powerful solar flares and violent CMEs recently. For instance, a rare backward sunspot called AR3296 erupted on May 7, sending a solar flare and a CME toward our planet.
The solar flare, consisting of electromagnetic radiation, hit first, ionizing the highest of Earth’s atmosphere, and producing a radio blackout over the western U.S. and the Pacific Ocean. CMEs consist of plasma and subsequently move more slowly, at speeds of a number of million miles per hour. So the CME from the May 7 event arrived a number of days later.
ENA particles may be used to inform the difference between two different sites of solar particle acceleration, in accordance with the brand new study, which was led by Gang Li, a professor of space science on the University of Alabama in Huntsville. These sites are the tremendous loops of plasma that emerge from sunspots and end in solar flares and areas which can be downstream of CME-driven shocks.
“The last word goal of using ENAs is to acquire various physics parameters on the acceleration sites,” Li said in a press release. “Scientists know that particles might be accelerated at two possible locations: either solar flares or CME-driven shock. Nonetheless, which site is more efficient in accelerating particles? Which site can speed up particles to higher energies? These are sometimes debated questions, and we have no idea the reply.”
Answering these questions by simply observing the sun has been tough, because it is difficult to take direct measurements from around these acceleration sites. Because ENAs are neutral particles, normally hydrogen atoms, they usually are not affected by magnetic fields. This characteristic makes them useful for studying these sites remotely, team members said.
“These neutral particles usually are not affected by the solar wind MHD [magnetohydrodynamic] turbulence as they propagate from the sun to observers,” Li said. “Compared, protons, ions, and electrons, because they’re charged, their propagation from the sun to the Earth is distorted by the solar wind magnetic field.”
Because of this ENAs carry all of the physical information of the acceleration site without distortion from magnetic fields, Li added. So, a dedicated ENA detector around Earth could potentially unlock their secrets, though it will be 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the particles’ acceleration site.
NASA is currently planning such an instrument as a part of its Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission, which shall be able to measuring ENAs originating from the sun.
“Our simulation forms a theoretical basis for interpreting future ENA observations,” Li added. “A dedicated ENA mission that filters out the more quite a few charged SEPs and goes directly after these ENA measurements can provide recent details about SEP acceleration near the sun and help solve long-standing questions which have baffled the community.”
The team’s research was published in February in The Astrophysical Journal.
