An international team of solar physicists, including academics from Northumbria University, in Newcastle upon Tyne, has recently measured the global magnetic field of the outer most layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, the solar corona, for the first time. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-global-magnetic-field-solar-corona.html…
Tag: solar corona
Solar Orbiter’s 1st views of the sun
Solar Orbiter’s new views are the closest images of the sun taken so far. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/solar-orbiters-first-views-of-the-sun…
SOHO’s 4,000th comet
This week, a citizen scientist spotted a never-before-seen comet in data from the sun-observing SOHO spacecraft. It was SOHO’s 4,000th comet discovery. Learn more and watch comets sweep near the sun in this video. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/sohos-4000th-comet…
Astronomers unveil the magnetic field of the solar corona
While the world has been dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have been hard at work studying the solar corona, the outermost atmosphere of the sun which expands into interplanetary space. This stream of charged particles radiating from the surface of the sun is called the solar wind and expands to fill…
First direct observation of elusive waves reveals energy channels in solar atmosphere
For the first time, torsional Alfvén waves have been directly observed in the solar corona by a team of researchers from the University of Oslo and the University of Warwick. The discovery sheds light on the origin of magnetic waves and their role in the heating of the sun’s corona. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-03-elusive-reveals-energy-channels-solar.html…
Were snakes the source of China’s coronavirus outbreak?
A report suggests that snakes – the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra – might have been the original source of the coronavirus that’s triggered an outbreak of deadly infectious respiratory illnesses in China this year. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/snakes-original-source-china-coronavirus-outbreak…
Scientists see a new kind of explosion on the sun
A new kind of magnetic explosion, called forced magnetic reconnection, was seen for the first time in images from NASA’s SDO spacecraft. Learn more in this beautiful video. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/new-kind-of-explosion-on-sun-video…
‘We’re missing something fundamental about the sun’
Parker Solar Probe – now in its 4th orbit around our local star – is designed to endure the sun’s heat and radiation like no previous mission. Data collected during the craft’s first 2 orbits were released last month. This week, 4 new studies in Nature have space scientists buzzing. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/parker-solar-probe-4-new-studies-dec-4-2019…
Anisotropic radio-wave scattering in the solar corona
Solar radio emission is produced in the turbulent medium of the solar atmosphere, and its observed properties (source position, size, time profile, polarization, etc.) are significantly affected by the propagation of the radio waves from the emitter to the observer. Scattering of radio waves on random density irregularities has long been recognized as an important process for the interpretation of radio…
Heating the solar corona
The hot outer layer of the sun, the corona, has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin, much more than the surface temperature of the Sun which is only about 5500 degrees Kelvin. Moreover, the corona is very active and ejects a wind of charged particles at a rate equivalent to about one-millionth of the moon’s mass each year. Some…