SOLOPOS.COM – Illustration. aurora on earth. (Freepik)
Solopos.com, JAKARTA – Radio waves around the sun have formed “auroras” like on earth.
Scientists have seen a stunning “aurora-like” display of crackling radio waves over the surface of the sun that is very similar to the Northern Lights on Earth.
The solar light show occurs roughly 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) above the magnetically curved dark field sunspot on the surface of our star.
Astronomers on Earth detected the burst of radio waves for a week. Scientists have detected aurora-like radio signals from distant stars in the past, but this is the first time they have seen signals of this kind from our sun. They published their findings on November 13 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“This is very different from transient solar radio bursts that typically last minutes or hours,” said lead author Sijie Yu, an astronomer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT-CSTR), quoted Business from from LiveScience.
“This is an exciting discovery that has the potential to change our understanding of stellar magnetic processes.” he added.
On Earth, auroras are the result of the sun’s energetic debris passing through the atmosphere near the poles, where the protective magnetic field is weakest, and agitating oxygen and nitrogen molecules. This causes the molecules to release energy in the form of light, tracing a curtain of color across the sky.
Solar debris is usually flung away from the sun when the magnetic fields around sunspots become tangled before suddenly breaking up.
The resulting release of energy triggers bursts of radiation called solar flares and jets of solar material explosions called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). By pointing a radio telescope at a sunspot on our star’s surface, the researchers detected aurora-like emissions on it, which they believe are the result of the acceleration of electrons from solar flares along the sunspot’s strong magnetic field lines.
“However, unlike auroras on Earth, these sunspot aurora emissions occur at frequencies ranging from hundreds of thousands of kHz [kilohertz] to around 1 million kHz – a direct result of the sunspot’s magnetic field which is thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field,” said Yu.
For comparison, auroras generally on Earth emit light at frequencies between 100 and 500 kHz.
The researchers say their discovery has opened up a new way to study solar activity, and they have begun poring over archival data to find hidden evidence of past solar auroras.
“We are starting to piece together the puzzle of how energetic particles and magnetic fields interact in a system with the long-lasting presence of star spots,” study co-author Surajit Mondal, a solar physicist at NJIT, said in a statement.
“Not only on our Sun, but also on stars far outside our solar system.”
This article was published on Bisnis.com by title “The first time! Astronomers See Aurora on the Sun”
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2023-11-26 12:24:00
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