An explosion on the Sun is helping scientists uncover new information about what causes powerful solar eruptions and how one might be able to better predict them in the future.
Context
An explosion on the Sun is helping scientists uncover new information about what causes powerful solar eruptions and how one might be able to better predict them in the future.
- This explosion contained components of three different types of solar eruptions that usually occur separately.
What is Solar eruption?
- Eruptions on the Sun usually come in one of three forms –
- Coronal mass ejections (CMEs): CMEs are explosive eruptions.
- CMEs form huge bubbles that expand out, pushed and sculpted by the Sun’s magnetic fields.
- Jets: They are explosive eruptions that cast energy and particles into space, but they look very different.
- Jets erupt as narrow columns of solar material.
- Partial eruptions: It starts erupting from the surface but doesn’t conjure enough energy to leave the Sun, so most of the material falls back down onto the solar surface.
- Understanding the mechanism behind such events, especially CMEs, is of utmost importance to predict when a large eruption might cause disruptions on Earth.
Key-highlights of the observation
- This explosion contained components of three different types of solar eruptions that usually occur separately – making it the first time such an event has been reported.
- Having all three eruption types together in one event provides scientists with something of a solar Rosetta Stone, allowing them to translate what they know about each type of solar eruption to understand other types and uncover an underlying mechanism that could explain all types of solar eruptions.
