- Alexandra Martins
- BBC News World
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Credit, THIS
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“This image is absolutely spectacular because it shows solar material literally coming out of the Sun at distances of several solar radii, maintaining its continuity,” highlights solar physicist José Carlos del Toro Iniesta.
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Upon seeing this image, Spanish scientist José Carlos del Toro Iniesta was stunned.
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“I am a specialist in solar physics, but first of all I am a human being and my first feeling is that of any human being: the amazement at beauty. If something differentiates us as human beings, it is that we know how to distinguish, understand and communicate beauty. It’s what gives meaning to our lives,” he said.
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The image of the colossal ejection of solar material was released by the European Space Agency (ESA). It was captured on 15 February by one of the instruments on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint ESA and NASA mission.
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The image shows what is known as a solar bulge eruption, according to Del Toro Iniesta — one of the lead researchers on the Solar Orbiter mission and professor at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalusia, in Spain,” he explained to BBC News Mundo (the BBC’s Spanish service).
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“The solar flares (not always, but in many cases) erupt, expel solar material into the interplanetary medium, and that material eventually reaches Earth,” he said. “These are regions of the Sun where the material is denser and cooler than its surroundings, but remains suspended on the surface due to the action of the magnetic field.”
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The scientist pointed out that when the magnetic field is reconfigured due to some disturbance and its topology is changed, the stored energy is transformed into kinetic energy, the movement of the gas, which ends up being expelled.
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The image captured by Solar Orbiter “is absolutely spectacular because it shows solar material literally leaving the Sun at distances of several solar radii, maintaining its continuity,” according to Del Toro Iniesta. “In that sense, it’s the biggest solar flare ever observed.”
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The image is also unusual in that it shows the entire solar disk. The expert points out that “normally, we solar physicists tend to observe in detail small pieces of the Sun, not the entire star”.
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The risks of solar storms
In the case of this ESA image, the ejection of solar material was not directed towards Earth. In fact, she was pulling away from us. But what happens when these particles reach Earth?
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“This material detaches itself from the Sun, travels through interplanetary space and reaches Earth, producing the famous solar storms. The correct name would be geomagnetic storms, because it is on Earth that the storm is being produced, although its origin is solar”, he highlighted. Del Toro Iniesta.
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Credit, Getty Images
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Aurora Borealis is one of the effects of solar storms
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He explains: “Basically, solar particles are ejected with great energy, at very high, sometimes almost relativistic, speeds of a third or a quarter of the speed of light — something astonishing. This kinetic energy of the material, when it reaches Earth, meets our protective shield, which is the Earth’s magnetic field.”
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“The particles are basically protons – hydrogen atoms whose electron has been stripped away. They are electrically charged and, when they reach the geomagnetic field, they are forced to move along the field lines”, according to the physicist.
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As the magnetic field starts at the North Pole and ends at the Sun Pole, the particles, upon reaching the magnetic field, travel to the poles. “As we approach the planet from the poles, the aurora we are used to seeing are first formed and are the most beautiful effect of these solar storms. But they are not the only effect.”
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Credit, Kindness JC del Toro Iniesta
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Solar physicist José Carlos del Toro Iniesta, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalusia, Spain, is one of the main researchers of SO/PHI, the instrument on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft in charge of providing images of the magnetic field.
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Del Toro Iniesta explains that when the energy of the particles is very high, the shock is more pronounced and the particles can even overcome the geomagnetic shield and reach areas of the atmosphere closer to Earth — typically the ionosphere, altering their chemistry.
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“In this Zoom conversation, we are now using the ionosphere because we are communicating via satellite,” according to the Spanish scientist. “Satellites and radio communications use the ionosphere as a mirror, so, of course, if the ionosphere changes, communications change as well.”
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These changes may affect GPS systems used in automobiles to move from one point to another.
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If the satellite’s orbit changes, “we lose precision, which, in our case, may be of little concern”, according to the physicist. “But if the satellite is being used by a ship with thousands of tons of oil and a lot of money involved, or an ocean-going passenger plane (which are the most vulnerable to these particle bombardments because they travel through the poles), it could endanger passengers’ lives.”
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“In fact, the International Space Station has a panic room – an armored chamber with a great thickness of lead, so that when these solar storms are produced, the particle bombardment does not reach the astronauts”, added the expert.
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Particle bombardment affected large cable assemblies and caused a multi-hour blackout in 1989 across the east coast of Canada and the United States.
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Del Toro Iniesta highlights that “our life is increasingly dependent on technology and more and more vulnerable to this type of phenomenon that has been happening since the Sun has existed and since the world has been a world – that is, this story has been repeating itself for 4 .5 billion years. But until now, we weren’t that sensitive to this phenomenon.”
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The Solar Orbiter mission will allow scientists to carry out unprecedented observations.
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The mission “brings together, for the first time, remote sounding and local measurement instruments”, according to the physicist. “Remote sounding devices are those that are looking at the Sun at a distance from the spacecraft, like the instrument that produced the photo.”
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“But we also have local measuring instruments and, with them, we measure the properties of the particles that we find during the trip. As these particles originate from the Sun, for the first time we have the means to understand the measurements of local particles and their origin” , explains the scientist.
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Credit, ESA / ATG medialab
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Solar Orbiter will approach the Sun to the orbit of Mercury
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“Furthermore, we are getting closer to the Sun than ever before. We are going to get closer to 0.3 astronomical units.” [uma unidade astronômica é a distância entre a Terra e o Sol]. We are approaching to the orbit of the planet Mercury. We’ll get very close with this set of instruments, which will provide us with information to understand many things”, highlights Del Toro Iniesta.
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Scientists seek to understand, for example, how the Sun generates all the phenomena that have consequences for the heliosphere and the interplanetary environment. The Spanish physicist teaches that “the heliosphere is the part of the universe in which the Sun has an apparent influence. Understanding this origin and the behavior of these phenomena is something fascinating.”
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But there is one great mystery in particular. Del Toro Iniesta explains: “There are questions that have driven solar physicists crazy for a long time. We know that the region of the Sun where the bulge comes from — the solar corona — is a lot hotter than the surface. A lot.”
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“On the surface we have 6,000 degrees Celsius, and in the corona we have millions of degrees. That’s not normal. Why? We can prove it at home — hot warms cold and the heat source is at the center of the Sun.”
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“If energy were transported only by radiation, the temperature of solar material would have to go down steadily as we move away from it. And that’s what happens all the way to the surface, but then boom! it suddenly rises. where does this energy come from?”, asks the scientist.
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“We believe that it is channeled by magnetic fields and that other processes that are not thermal transport energy from the interior to the outside, but in a peculiar way. We believe it to be something like this, but we still don’t have strong evidence.”
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“And like that, there are many other questions,” concludes Del Toro Iniesta.
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