The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spotted a portion of the sun with a spectacular appearance like a meteor. Image: ESA/Solar Orbiter EUI/HRI/Patrick Antolin
SPACE — Astronomers have spotted streaks like never before seen meteor showers on the surface of the sun. However, you should think twice before trying to catch these shooting stars.
“If humans were alien beings capable of living on the surface of the sun, we would continue to be rewarded with the awe-inspiring sight of shooting stars, but we must be careful with our heads!” said Patrick Antolin, a solar physicist at the University of Northumbria in London and lead author of the discovery in a statement.
These shooting stars on the sun are very different from shooting stars that appear above Earth, which are fragments of space dust and rock, or small asteroids that enter the atmosphere at high speed and burn up to create streaks of light. Solar shooting stars are giant blobs of plasma that crash onto the star’s surface at tremendous speed.
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On Earth, most meteors don’t reach the surface due to the thickness of our planet’s atmosphere. The sun’s atmosphere (corona), however, is much thinner so these blobs don’t completely peel off as they fall. Thus, a shooting star from the sun can reach the surface of our star intact.
These observations were made with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft, marking the first time this impact has been seen. The findings have revealed the process can create brief but intense brightness and updrafts of stellar material as well as shock waves that reheat coronal gas upon impact.
Because of this, scientists think the discovery could help solve the mystery of why the corona, the outermost portion of the sun’s atmosphere, is so much hotter than the layers of the sun beneath it. Although solar models predict the sun will be hotter near its core.
A shooting star seen by Solar Orbiter while observing a spectacular plasma fireworks display called a coronal rain. The rain is formed from gases with temperatures above 2 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Singing in the Rain
Instead of being made up of water, coronal rains form when a drop in temperature causes the sun’s plasma to clump together into super-dense blobs. After reaching a size of 155 miles (250 kilometers) wide, these plumes then fall onto the sun’s much cooler surface, the photosphere, as torrential rain at speeds of up to 220,000 miles per hour or 100 kilometers per second.
Solar Orbiter spotted the corona rain as it passed just 30 million miles (49 million kilometers) from the sun, which is closer than the orbit of the innermost planet Mercury in the solar system. The probe, equipped with a high-resolution camera and a set of sensitive remote-sensing instruments, saw gas heated to about a million degrees and compressed under the coronal rain. The phenomenon lasts only a few minutes and is the result of a plume falling.
On Earth, a bright tail, created when friction in the atmosphere heats meteoroid material, is characteristic of shooting stars. Frictional heating turns solid matter directly into a gas in a process called ablation. Ablations also occur when a comet orbiting the sun gets too close to our star, but this did not happen for this sun’s shooting star.
That’s because the strong magnetic field in the corona strips gas from the falling plume and thus prevents the formation of a bright tail, something that has hampered observations of solar meteors until now. “The inner solar corona is so hot that we may never be able to investigate it in situ with spacecraft,” said Antolin.
“However, the Solar Orbiter orbits close enough to the sun that it can detect small-scale phenomena occurring within the corona, such as the effect of rain on the corona, allowing us to make valuable indirect investigations of the coronal environment which is very important to understand, composition and thermodynamics.”
The team’s research will be presented
by Antolin this week at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2023). This research will also be published in a special issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Source: Space.com
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2023-07-06 14:09:48
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