A research team from NASA’s Southwest Research Institute and the Max Planck Solar System Research Institute has found network-like plasma structures in the Sun’s middle corona using an innovative observation technique that allows ultraviolet imaging of the middle corona. Their findings were recently published in the journalism. Nature Astronomy. The discovery could help improve our understanding of the origin of the solar wind and its interaction with the rest of the Solar System.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been observing the Sun’s corona since 1995 using the Wide Angle and Spectrometric Chorograph aboard NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft to monitor space weather that can affect Earth. However, the LASCO instrument has a blind spot that prevents observation of the central solar corona, from which the solar wind originates.

“We’ve known about the flow of solar wind since the 1950s. “When solar wind develops, it can affect space weather and affect things like power grids, satellites, and astronauts,” said SwRI Principal Scientist Dr. Dan Seaton, one of the authors of the study. somehow remains mysterious. Although we had a basic understanding of the processes, we didn’t have these observations before, so we had to work with a knowledge gap.”

To find new ways to observe the Sun’s corona, Seaton suggested pointing another instrument, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI), to NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) instead of pointing it directly at the Sun and making UV observations. one month. What Seaton and his colleagues saw were long, net-like structures of plasma in the Sun’s central corona. Interactions within these structures release stored magnetic energy that propels particles into space.

“No one has observed what the solar corona is doing in the ultraviolet at this altitude for this long. We had no idea if it would work or what we would see,” he said. “The results were very exciting. For the first time, we have high-quality observations that fully integrate our Sun and heliosphere observations in a single system.”

Seaton believes these observations could lead to a more complete picture and even more exciting discoveries in missions like PUNCH (Polarimeter for Coronal Heliosphere Unification), a NASA mission led by SwRI that will image how the Sun’s outer corona transforms into the solar wind.

“Now that we can image the central corona of the Sun, we can relate what PUNCH is seeing to its source and have a more complete picture of how the solar wind interacts with the rest of the Solar System,” Seaton said. Said. “Before these observations, very few people believed that the middle corona could be observed in the UV at these distances. These studies launched an entirely new approach to observing the corona on a large scale.”