A rotating and rotating plasma streamer that escapes to the sun after a coronal mass expulsion (CME) has been captured in video by the solar orbiter of the European Space Agency, and could provide vital clues on how the magnetic energy that the solar wind and giant eruptions in the sun drive.
The helical streamer was seen by Solar orbitter On October 12, 2022. It lasted more than three hours, extending up to 2 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) in length, transporting plasma and magnetic energy away from The sun.
Solar Orbiter used his Metis instrument, which presents a coronagram To block the glow of the body of the sun, to allow the solar orbiter to see the weakest outside of the sun atmospherecalled the crown, in the visible and ultraviolet light. It is the dim crown, full of serpentines, which we can see from Earth for a total Solar eclipse.
Helical structures have been trapped in the camera in the solar crown before, but have never been observed in such detail or for so long. How Streamer developed now offers solar physicists clues about what the Solar wind and Cmes.
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The researchers led by Paolo Romano, of the National Institute of Astrophysics, in the Astrophysical Observatory of Catania in Italy, have studied the twisting streamer and tracked it until its origin in the lower crown.
The image they present is this: at the base of the crown, magnetic energy is stored in tense magnetic field lines. The crown is full of holes, such as Swiss cheese, where magnetic field lines are open; This is extended to space instead of bending again on the surface of the sun (called a photograph one) in a closed circuit.
The solar wind blows through these coronal holes. There is a phenomenon known as exchange reconnection, which is magnetic reconnection (where magnetic field lines are broken and then connect again, releasing energy) between the open and closed magnetic fields in the lower part of the crown. The most powerful reconnection events can release enough energy to produce Solar flares and explosive magnetic filaments that result in CME.
On a smaller scale, exchange reconnection promotes a constant and global population of airplanes that inject energy into the crown and through coronal holes. These jets energize the magnetic waves in the solar plasma called Alfvén waves, which in turn push the plasma around and through the coronal holes, in the process that expels the matter in the solar wind that blows through those holes.
So where does the clumsy streamer come into play? Based on observations of Solar Orbitter and his partner in the crime, NASA Parker solar probe – That it approaches both the sun and to immerse themselves in the crown, solar physicists have convinced themselves that the magnetic structure of the plasma getaway of a massive event of exchange reconnection is in the form of a “twisted flow rope.”
A flow rope is a magnetic energy tube that has exploded in a solar filament, which is a plasma lace or plasma channel sustained by closed magnetic fields. The reconnection of the exchange between the filament and the surrounding magnetic field lines releases the energy that a CME feeds, the resulting expulsion is a powerful jet that explodes through the solar crown and in space, dragging the plasma with it to form the CME. This flow tube forms the bright center of a CME.
And that is exactly what the solar orbiter witnessed: the twisted flow tube after a powerful exchange reconnection event that launched a giant CME to space.
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According to computer simulations, the twisted nature of the flow tube is a natural consequence of a long -term exchange reconnection. However, solar orbitter observations with Meti revealed more. The inclination, or the inclination, of the torsion characteristics in the flow tube that escapes decreases with the height on the sun, indicating that the magnetic field lines are growing more radially with the sun as they spread in the solar system. The disturbances in the magnetic field transported by the streamer could be amplified as they advance in space.
The Roman team speculates that it could be these disturbances that create the Magnetic SwitchbacksWhere the direction of the magnetic field in the solar wind suddenly reverses the course before continuing forward in a kind of movement in Zigzagueo, as you see so much the solar orbiter and the solar probe of Parker.
For decades, the greatest mysteries of the sun: how the solar crown is heated to more than one million degrees Celsius, for example, and where the energy comes to drive the solar wind and the CME, they were secretly secrets. Now that Solar Orbitter and Parker Solar Probe are approaching the sun as possible, the sun is finally renouncing its greatest enigmas.
The academic research document that describes the observations of Solar Orbitter on the Streamer of twist was published on March 26 in The Astrophysical Journal.
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