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The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has traced the origin of energetic particles from the Sun, deepening understanding of space weather.
The study reveals connections between solar energetic electrons and solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections.
This understanding could help protect satellites and astronauts from solar threats, enhancing our knowledge of the Sun's impact on Earth.
After becoming the first to image the Sun’s poles, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter has traced the origin of energetic particles emerging from the Sun, according to a new study.
The Solar Orbiter space probe, a joint project of ESA and NASA, was launched in 2020. Since then, it has captured images of the Sun from a closer range than any other spacecraft and has become the first to look at its polar regions, according to ESA.
Now, in a study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Solar Orbiter has helped researchers understand the sources of ‘Solar Energetic Electrons’ (SEE), which are electrons created in the Sun before being thrown into space.
One set of SEE is linked to solar flares, explosions from smaller patches of the Sun’s surface. The other is released gradually and is connected to coronal mass ejections (CME), a vast eruption of billions of tonnes of plasma and accompanying magnetic fields from the Sun’s outer atmosphere.
“It’s the first time we have clearly seen this connection between energetic electrons in space and their source events taking place at the Sun,” co-author of the study Frederic Schuller from Alexander Warmuth of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), Germany, said in a statement.
Schuller explained that the Solar Orbiter flew through the electron streams while observing the Sun. “We also gathered information about the space environment between the Sun and spacecraft,” he added.
The space probe is equipped with 10 instruments, which makes measurements of the solar wind around the spacecraft. It also uses remote sensing to look at the Sun’s features from a distance.
Between November 2020 and December 2022, the Solar Orbiter observed more than 300 bursts of SEEs. The researchers also observed a lag between what the events happening at the Sun, and the release of energetic electrons into space, sometimes even taking hours to reach space, when they spot a CME or a solar flare. They explain that this could be due to a delay in release or detection.
Further, the electrons encounter turbulence, get scattered in different directions, leading to a lag in detection.
The study could help understand space weather, the conditions of the space environment driven by the Sun such as solar flares, CME, solar particle events and the solar wind.
Space weather has implications on Earth, such as disrupting satellite communication and GPS navigation, and interrupting power supply by causing voltage instability.
CMEs, according to the researchers, is more important for space weather as they hold more high-energy particles and so, threaten far more damage. “Knowledge such as this from solar orbiter will help protect other spacecraft in the future, by letting us better understand the energetic particles from the Sun that threaten our astronauts and satellites,” Daniel Muller, ESA project scientist for solar orbiter, said in a statement.
Further, the solar orbiter has been designed to answer fundamental questions about the Sun, such as what drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity, what heats up the upper layer of its atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius, how does solar wind form and what accelerates it to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second and how does it all affect our planet.