New Delhi: An international team of researchers have proven a theory on how solar flares originate, that was first proposed 19 years ago. Solar flares are energetic outbursts where plasma from the Sun is released in violent outbursts from clusters of sunspots with complex magnetic configurations. The energy released in a single solar flare can be 10 million times greater than the energy of a volcano eruption. The coronal mass ejections (CMEs) associated with the solar flares can travel through the solar system, impacting all the planets from Mercury to Neptune, and disrupting the energy, communications and navigation infrastructure of humans on Earth.
For this reason, it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms of solar flares, that have their origin in the complex and tangled magnetic fields of the active regions. Consequently, humans can build critical systems that are safeguarded from solar flares. Reconnections in the magnetic field lines, technically termed as ‘super-Alfvénic slippage’ has been dubbed as ‘slip-running’, inspired by the wild scrambles of Wile E. Coyote after Road Runner. Such slip-running has been observed in the difficult to track ‘solar flare kernels’, tiny, brilliant features on the atmosphere of the Sun moving at thousands of kilometres per second.
Slip-running could be a universal process
The high-resolution observations were made possible by NASA’s IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) satellite. A paper describing the research has been published in Nature Astronomy. One of the study authors, Vanessa Polito says, “The tiny, bright features observed by IRIS trace the very fast motion of footpoints of individual magnetic field lines, which slip along the solar atmosphere during a flare.” The close-up observations made possible by the proximity of the host star allows scientists to better understand the ongoing processes in more distant and exotic objects, including the rapidly spinning cores of dead stars known as pulsars, and black holes.
