Coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or bursts of magnetic plasma, from the Sun’s corona are truly terrifying. They can power high-energy space storms millions of kilometers away and pose a threat satellites, astronauts, and even electronic devices in Earth’s atmosphere. That’s why engineers were delighted to learn that the Parker Solar Probe had passed through the CME unscathed on September 5, 2022.

Scientists had many scientific reasons to celebrate: Parker’s perilous journey gave the probe a great opportunity to see the CME up close. And in fact, Parker’s observations helped scientists confirm a theory developed two decades ago.

As two scientists suggested in 2003, CMEs may be pushing back interplanetary dust—tiny debris from planets, asteroids, and comets that continues to drift around the Sun. Interplanetary dust is small and difficult to observe, but Parker’s Wide Field Imager for the Solar Probe (WISPR) was able to capture the light reflected from the particles. However, the particles of such light were still very thin; however, scientists strengthened the signals by subtracting average brightnesses from WISPR images taken during similar orbits.

When they did this, they found that the CME was blowing dust from the Sun along a path approximately 6 million miles (9.7 million kilometers) long. Guillermo Stenborg, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the paper, compared the observed effect to a vacuum cleaner. And like a freshly vacuumed room, interplanetary dust space quickly filled with more interplanetary dust.

Whether all CMEs pollinate in this way remains an open question. Since astronomers have only observed this phenomenon with the event in 2022, Stenborg and his colleagues believe that only the strongest CMEs could be responsible for such a cleanup. Fortunately, the sun is nearing maximum and Parker and other observatories may have more opportunities to observe these terrifying CMEs. Source