Special – Marwa Al-Batta
Scientists have discovered a stunning “aurora-like” display of intermittent radio waves above the surface of the sun, which is strikingly similar to the northern lights on Earth.
Solar lights were displayed roughly 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) above the sunspot, a dark, magnetically distorted patch on the surface of our star. Astronomers on Earth detected bursts of radio waves over the course of a week.
Scientists have detected aurora-like radio signals from distant stars in the past, but this is the first time they have seen a signal of this type from our sun.
“This is very different from typical transient solar radio bursts that typically last minutes or hours,” lead author Siji Yu, an astronomer at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Center for Terrestrial Solar Research (NJIT-CSTR), said in a statement. “It is an exciting discovery that has the potential to… “This will change our understanding of stellar magnetic processes.”
On Earth, auroras are the result of energetic solar debris shooting through the atmosphere near the poles, where the protective magnetic field is weakest, stirring up oxygen and nitrogen molecules. This causes the particles to release energy in the form of light, tracing wavy curtains of color across the sky.
Solar debris is typically launched away from the Sun when magnetic fields around sunspots tangle in kinks before suddenly breaking off. The resulting release of energy triggers bursts of radiation called solar flares and explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
By pointing a radio telescope at a sunspot on the surface of our star, researchers detected an aurora-like emission above it, which they believe is the result of electrons from solar flares being accelerated along the sunspots’ strong magnetic field lines.
“However, unlike Earth’s aurora, sunspot aurora emissions occur at frequencies ranging from hundreds of thousands of kilohertz,” Yu said. [كيلوهيرتز] “To approximately one million kilohertz – a direct result of the sunspot’s magnetic field being thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field.” . By comparison, a typical aurora on Earth emits light at frequencies between 100 and 500 kilohertz.
The researchers say their discovery has opened up new ways to study the Sun’s activity, and they have begun digging into archival data to find hidden clues to past solar auroras.
“We have begun to piece together the puzzle of how energetic particles and magnetic fields interact in a system with long-period stellar spots,” study co-author Surajit Mondal, a solar physicist at NJIT, said in the statement. “Not only on our sun but also on stars outside our solar system.”
