Scientists find a solar eruption that has maintained its temp for six yrs

This phenomenon in space can impact the Earth's ground and space technologies and has been known to disrupt radio transmissions, this observation may help astronomers understand why this happens

Scientists in India found that a solar eruption that occurred in July 2017 has maintained its temperature for nearly six years, reported the Ministry of Science and Technology on Monday, June 12.

Scientists have been tracking the continuous evolution of the energy state of the core of a solar eruption that occurred on July 20, 2017. They found that it had, surprisingly, maintained a constant temperature.

It had erupted energetic and highly-magnetised plasma from the solar corona into space.

Scientists now believe that this finding can help improve the understanding of how such eruptions can impact communication systems on Earth.

 

How CMEs can disrupt the range of satellites and other technology on Earth

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are large-scale eruptions of charged particles (plasma) and magnetic fields from the solar atmosphere into space.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), CMEs have potential destructive properties as they have their own magnetic field and can disrupt earth's magnetic field. It has also been known to cause electrical blackouts and disrupt radio transmissions.

Astronomers researching the solar eruption in 2017, found that despite releasing energetic and highly magnetised plasma from the sun's corona into space, the temperature of the eruption remained constant.

When the sun releases CMEs, charged particles, and magnetic fields are thrown into space.

CMEs contain plasma at different temperatures, ranging from cold to extremely hot. As CMEs move, various processes can either heat up or cool down the plasma by exchanging different forms of energy.

To understand these processes, scientists study the changes in properties like density, temperature, and thermal pressure of CMEs. This knowledge is crucial for monitoring space weather and its consequences on Earth.

However, as CMEs evolve closer to the sun, within 3 times the sun's radius, observations in these regions have been limited.

What did the scientists find?

The team of scientists consisting of Vaibhav Pant and Dipankar Banerjee and researcher Jyoti Sheoran from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Govt of India, and Ritesh Patel from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, USA tracked were part of the team tracking the CME.

They observed that despite the core expanding, which would usually cause cooling, the temperature remained constant as it moved from 1.05 to 1.35 times the radius of the sun. They used data from ground-based and space-based instruments to support these findings.

Additionally, they observed that the density of the core decreased by about 3.6 times as it moved outward.

Based on their observations, the scientists concluded that the expansion of the core behaved more like an isothermal process (constant temperature) rather than an adiabatic process (where heat exchange occurs).

Future prospects of this discovery

In the future, India's Aditya-L1 mission, equipped with the visible emission line coronagraph (VELC), will provide more data about CMEs in the inner corona. Analysing this data will offer new insights into the evolution of CME properties in that region.

A similar kind of analysis using VELC data will provide new insights of the evolution of CME thermodynamic properties in the inner corona.