Scientists were bombarding their thoughts on so-called strange magnetic ripples that probably exist in the Sun’s outer atmosphere for more than 80 years but now they have been viewed directly for the first time. Using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), the most advanced solar observatory ever built, an international team was able to detect the long-sought torsional Alfven waves in the Sun’s corona.
Their findings published in Nature Astronomy, could finally provide the answer to how the imagined millions of degrees hotter corona gets heated than the relatively modest 5,500°C of the Sun’s visible surface.
Capturing subtler ways of the idolized sun
A vortex of magnetic waves was then proposed by the 1942 Nobel Laureate, Hannes Alfven waves move through plasma the charged gaseous substance that makes up most of the Sun. While scientists discovered large, unevenly versioned waves, faint small-scale twisting motions had never been confirmed directly.
ALSO READ: Jupiter’s Role as the Solar System’s Father: The Science Behind It
That changed when Professor Richard Morton of Northumbria University and his colleagues successfully used the Cryogenic Near Infrared Spectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP) on DKIST. This avant garde instrument can detect extremely small light fluctuations caused by movements in intensely heated iron around 1.6 million degrees Celsius in the corona.
Untangling the Solar Symphony
The team made it possible to achieve detection of faint red and blue Doppler shifts perceptibly minute signals of twisting motion on opposite sides of magnetic loops. To separate such weak signals, Morton had developed different methods of filtering the ambiguities that usually hide those torsional wave traces by larger kink wave like oscillations.
ALSO READ: Will Aliens Arrive on October 29? Scientists Decode 3I/ATLAS
This breakthrough indicates not just that such twisting waves exist they play a critical role in heating the corona and driving the solar wind that constantly streams through our solar system.
A Step Toward Predicting Space Weather
The relationship between energy transmission from the corona will improve models of space weather in order to better predict solar storms which interfere with satellites, communication systems and power grids on Earth.
Such research, involving experts from the UK, China, Belgium and the USA, ushers a new dawn in solar observing. DKIST’s unparalleled power has thus opened vast horizons for researchers in investigating hardly throbbing dynamics of the Sun, giving another impetus much closer to revealing life-sustaining secrets of the star around which we orbit.
ALSO READ: Is 3I/ATLAS an Alien Craft? Harvard Scientist Avi Loeb Reveals
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes and reflects current research findings, not definitive scientific consensus.
