When seeing the image above, the Spanish scientist José Carlos del Toro Iniesta was stunned.
“I am an expert in solar physics, but above all I am a human being and The first thing I feel is what any human being feels, the amazement at beauty. If something distinguishes us human beings, it is that we know how to distinguish, apprehend and communicate beauty. It is what gives meaning to our life”.
The image of the colossal ejection of solar material was released this week by the European Space Agency (ESA).
And it was captured on 15 February by one of the instruments of the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint mission of ESA and NASA.
The image captures what is known as a solar prominence eruption , explained to BBC Mundo Del Toro Iniesta, one of the principal investigators of the Solar Orbiter mission and a professor at the CSIC (Higher Council for Scientific Research) at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia.
“Solar prominences, not always, but on many occasions, erupt and expel solar material into the interplanetary medium and eventually that material reaches the Earth”.
“They are areas of the Sun in which the material is denser and colder than the surroundings, but which remains it is suspended above the surface by the action of the magnetic field”.
The scientist pointed out that when the magnetic field is reconfigured due to some disturbance, when its topology changes, the energy that was stored in the magnetic field is transformed into kinetic energy, from the movement of the gas, which is expelled”.
The image captured by Solar Orbiter “ it is absolutely spectacular because you see solar material that is literally leaving the Sun at distances of several solar radii maintaining continuity. In that sense it is the largest solar flare ever observed”.
It is also an unusual image because the complete disk of the Sun is observed.
“Normally, solar physicists tend to observe small pieces of the Sun in detail, not the entire Sun”, affirmed the expert.
The risks of solar storms
In the case of this ESA image, the ejection of material solar was not directed at Earth. In fact, it was moving away from us.
But what happens when these particles reach the Earth?
“This material breaks away from the Sun, travels through the interplanetary medium and reaches the Earth, producing the famous solar storms. They should be called geomagnetic storms because it is on Earth where the storm is taking place, even though its origin is solar”, said Del Toro Iniesta.
“Basically, the solar particles are ejected with great energy, at very high speeds, sometimes almost relativistic speeds, a third, a quarter of the speed of light, nonsense. That kinetic energy of the material, when it reaches the Earth finds our protective shield, which is the Earth’s magnetic field“.
“Particles are basically protons, hydrogen atoms from which the electron has been removed. As they are electrically charged, when they reach the geomagnetic field, it forces them to move along the field lines”.
Since the geomagnetic field is born at the North Pole and closes at the South Pole, what the particles do when they reach the geomagnetic field is to travel towards the poles.
“ Upon entering closer to the planet through the poles, the first thing that are formed are the auroras , which we are used to seeing and it is the most beautiful effect of these solar storms. But it is not the only one”.
Del Toro Iniesta explained that when the particles are especially energetic, then the shock is more pronounced and the particles can even overcome the geomagnetic shield and reach areas of the atmosphere closer to the Earth, typically the ionosphere, altering its chemistry.
“Now in this Zoom conversation we are using the ionosphere because we are communicating by satellite”, explained the Spanish scientist.
“Satellites, radio communications use the ionosphere as a mirror, so Of course, if you alter the ionosphere, you alter communications”.
These alterations can affect GPS systems, which are used in automobiles to move from one point to another.
If there are changes in the satellite’s orbit “we lose precision, something that in our case may be of little concern. But if the one who is getting help from the satellites is a ship with thousands of tons of crude oil and a lot of money in between, or a transoceanic passenger plane that are the most vulnerable to these particle bombardments because they go through the poles, then this could endanger the lives of passengers”.
“In fact, the International Space Station has a panic room, a vault with a great thickness of lead, so that when those solar storms occur, the particle bombardment does not affect the astronauts”, the expert added.
The particle bombardment affected large sledgehammers of cables and caused a multi-hour blackout in 2020 throughout the East Coast of Canada and the United States.
“Our life is increasingly dependent on technology and is increasingly vulnerable to this type of phenomenon that has been happening since the Sun is Sun and since the world is world, that is, 4.15 millions of years in history is repeated. But until now, we were not so sensitive to this phenomenon”.
The mysteries of the Sun
The Solar mission Orbiter will allow scientists unprecedented observations.
The mission “brings together remote-sounding and local-measuring instruments for the first time. Those of remote sounding are those in which we are looking at the Sun from the spacecraft at a distance, like the instrument that has produced this photo”.
“But then we have local measurement instruments, with which we are measuring the properties of the particles that we find on our journey. As these particles have their origin in the Sun, for the first time we have means to understand the measurements of the local particles and their origin”.
“Also, what we do approaching the Sun as no one has ever done . We are going to zoom in to 0.3 astronomical units (an astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). We are approaching as the orbit of the planet Mercury. We are going to get very close with that battery of instruments and that is going to provide us with information to understand many things”.
Scientists seek to understand, for example, how does the Sun generate all the phenomena that later have consequences in the heliosphere, in the interplanetary medium.
“The heliosphere is the small piece of the universe in which the Sun has a conspicuous influence. So, understanding the origin and behavior of these phenomena is something fascinating”.
But there is a great mystery in particular.
“There are questions that solar physicists have been driving us crazy for a long time. We know that the part of the Sun from which the bulge starts, the Sun’s corona, is much hotter than the surface. A lot”.
“On the surface we have 6,000 degrees and in the crown we have millions of degrees. That is not normal, why? At home we check it, the hot heats the cold, and the source of heat is in the center of the Sun. If the energy transport were only by radiation, the temperature of the solar material would have to decrease monotonically as we move away from it. And that’s what it does up to the surface, but then boom! goes up suddenly. Where does that energy come from?”
“We believe that it is channeled by magnetic fields and other non-thermal processes that transport energy from the inside out but in a way that is peculiar. We think things are going that way but we still don’t have reliable evidence”.
“And like that there are many other questions”.
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