New finding on solar eruptions can help improve know-how of their impact on communication systems

Vijay Mohan

Advertisement

Chandigarh, June 12

A new discovery by Indian scientists tracking solar eruptions can help improve the understanding of how such astronomical events in space can impact communication systems on Earth and enhance the ability to monitor space weather.

Scientists tracking the continuous evolution of the energy state of the core of a solar eruption have found that it strangely maintained a constant temperature as it threw up energetic and highly magnetised plasma from the solar corona into space.

Large-scale eruptions of charged particles and magnetic fields from the solar atmosphere into space, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can disrupt a range of ground and space-based technologies and satellites on Earth. This makes it crucial to understand their evolution and propagation through interplanetary space, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology on Monday.

There is a wide range of plasma temperatures within CMEs, from cold chromospheric material to hot plasma. When CMEs propagate, several processes can exchange electrical, kinetic, potential and thermal energy, etc., thereby heating or cooling the plasma. To understand these processes the study of the evolution of thermodynamic properties of CMEs such as density, temperature and thermal pressure is required.

In the past, scientists had studied the thermal evolution of CMEs in the solar corona, but earlier studies were limited to larger distances from the Sun, that is more than 1.5 times the radius of the Sun (RSun). The evolution of thermodynamic properties of CMEs is not yet well understood, primarily due to the lack of suitable observations, the ministry’s statement read.

A team of scientists consisting of Dr Vaibhav Pant, Prof Dipankar Banerjee and researcher Jyoti Sheoran from the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, along with Dr Ritesh Patel from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, USA, tracked the continuous evolution of the thermodynamic properties of the core of a solar eruption that had occurred on July 20, 2017.

In their study, they estimated the temperature and density of the CME core and found that strangely it maintains a constant temperature as it propagates from 1.05 to 1.35 RSun despite the expected adiabatic cooling due to the expansion of the core.

They also used data from the ground-based instruments such as Mauna Loa Solar Observatory and Coronal Multichannel Polarimeter, as well as data from the space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory and Atmospheric Imaging Assembly telescopes for the purpose.