So, a basic part of this mission is to be able to measure whether or not we crossed this critical point.” “The only way to do that is for the spacecraft to cross the outer boundary, which scientists call the Alfvén point. We can accomplish this by flying into the solar atmosphere,” says Michael Stevens, an astrophysicist at the CfA who helps monitor the cup. “The goal of this entire mission is to learn how the sun works. The cup collects particles from the sun’s atmosphere that helped scientists verify that the spacecraft had indeed crossed into the corona.
The historic moment was achieved thanks to a large collaboration of scientists and engineers, including members of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) who built and monitor a key instrument onboard the probe: the Solar Probe Cup.
On April 28, the Parker Solar Probe successfully entered the corona of the sun - an extreme environment that’s roughly 2 million degrees Fahrenheit. “That improves models of CMEs, opening the door to new science and leading to more accurate space weather forecasts.”ĬIRES is a partnership of NOAA and CU Boulder.A spacecraft launched by NASA has done what was once thought impossible. “With our technique, we can capture the dynamic beginnings of coronal mass ejections and see how they’re borne out into the heliosphere,” Seaton said. That missing information affects forecast accuracy. This approach is limited, according to Seaton, because a coronagraph misses details about what happens in the time between the first eruption and when the CME reappears farther away from the Sun-details like how the CME accelerates, and how much energy it gathers. In NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, forecasters find where CMEs originate using NASA’s Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO)-an instrument that blocks light from the Sun and a big region around it, creating an artificial eclipse to reveal the much dimmer corona. The team’s innovation could improve how forecasters detect and track solar eruptions, such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that pose space weather hazards at Earth. Farther away from the Sun, they observed more gradual outflows of the kind that can influence space weather. Credit: Dan Seaton/CIRES and NCEIįor example, the researchers tracked material moving back and forth between regions, seeing some inflows from outside the inner corona that triggered eruptions. This movie shows plasma in the Sun’s middle corona at two different temperatures (gold: 800,000☌, blue: 1.5 million☌), revealing the complex dynamics, outflows, and inflows that connect this region to the Sun itself and to the outer corona and heliosphere. “We didn’t think there was such a deep connection between these regions, but now we know they’re interacting all the time,” Seaton said. The new observations revealed surprising connections between the inner corona, with its complex magnetic structure, and the outer corona, where the solar wind flows into the heliosphere, the vast bubble of space surrounding the Sun. “It connects to the stuff that connects to us: the middle corona is where that happens, and we haven’t observed it before,” Seaton said. The middle corona is the place on the Sun that drives the solar wind and big solar eruptions that travel to Earth and can affect various technologies here, including blocking radio communications, damaging power grids and diminishing navigation system accuracy. With this innovative technique, the researchers were able to image a region of the corona that, while important, had been difficult to see. “It didn’t take building a new instrument, but using the instrument in a new way.”
“We tiled the images together,” Seaton said. In August and September of 2018, the researchers captured the middle corona by using SUVI to take pictures from one side of the Sun, pointing directly at the Sun, and then from the other side. The study, with co-authors from NASA, the Southwest Research Institute and Lockheed-Martin, was published today in Nature Astronomy. “We were able to create a larger field of view and construct mosaic images of the Sun showing the solar corona in extreme ultraviolet light, to answer questions about how the Sun’s outer atmosphere connects to the surface of the star." “Our instruments focus on the Sun, but not at the heights needed to see these events,” said Dan Seaton, a CIRES scientist in NCEI who led the study. Their observations, from the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) on the NOAA GOES-17 satellite, reveal how the middle corona influences the solar wind and eruptions from the Sun, a finding that could improve space weather forecasting. Using a NOAA telescope in a novel way, CIRES researchers working in NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information captured the first-ever images of dynamics in the Sun’s elusive middle corona.
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