Some Of Our Sun Is An Optical Illusion. ‘My Mind Exploded’ When I Found Out Says Shocked Scientist
The sun’s coronal loops.
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A solar physicist who developed a model of the Sun’s corona—it’s hotter, outer atmosphere that’s visible to the naked eye only during a total solar eclipse—has reacted with shock to her own findings that loops of plasma observed within it could be an optical illusion.
“I have spent my entire career studying coronal loops,” said Anna Malanushenko, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, who led a simulation-led study published in The Astrophysical Journal. “I was excited that this simulation would give me the opportunity to study them in more detail. I never expected this. When I saw the results, my mind exploded,” she said.
Coronal loops are fountains of multimillion-degree, electrified strands of plasma gas that scientists have long thought existed in the Sun’s atmosphere. They are thought to reveal where the corona is heated to temperatures 1,000-times greater than the Sun’s visible surface.
They can be seen in images taken of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light.
However, many of these loops may be optical illusions, according to the paper. In the study the scientists constructed an extremely detailed computer model that simulated what was happening in multiple regions of the Sun, from 10,000 kilometers below its surface to 40,000 kilometers into the corona.
The solar corona as seen on August 21, 2017 during the “Great American Eclipse,” a total solar … [+]
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It appears that because the solar corona is very thin to look at—as can be sen during the brief totality period of a total solar eclipse—the structures in the corona overlap each another in photographs. Many of the thin strands may be optical artifacts be “wrinkles” of bright plasma in the corona.
This challenges assumptions of what solar physicists know and don’t know about the Sun, largely because coronal loops have been used for decades to infer how dense and hot its corona is.
“This study demonstrates that the way we currently interpret the observations of the Sun may not be adequate for us to truly understand the physics of our star,” said Malanushenko. “This is an entirely new paradigm of understanding the Sun’s atmosphere.” However, the scientists stress that new observational methods and data analysis techniques are needed to study the corona further in the hope of proving their “coronal veil hypothesis.”
The model also simulated the process of a solar flare for the first time, from build-up to explosive release.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
