A 60,000-mile-high wave of super-hot plasma blazing across the sun’s surface at 560,000 mph? Yep.
“Now we know. Solar tsunamis are real,” said John Gurman of the Solar Physics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in a press release Tuesday.
NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory has confirmed that the crazy circular bursts on the surface of the sun, rising higher than the Earth is wide, aren’t just optical illusions.
STEREO consists of two spacecraft pointing at the sun, one ahead of Earth in its orbit and one behind, that acquire stereoscopic images of the sun to give a sort of three-dimensional view, similar to the way our two eyes do.
Though these solar tsunamis, technically known as fast-mode magnetohydrodynamical waves, were first seen by the SOHO mission more than a decade ago, the single spacecraft couldn’t determine if the wave was real or the shadow of a coronal mass ejection. But in February the STEREO twins were perfectly poised to catch the eruption of a sunspot that spawned a wave, seen in the movie above.
“It was definitely a wave,” George Mason University scientist Spiros Patsourakos, lead author of a paper on the solar tsunamis in August in The Astrophysical Research Journal Letters, said in a press release. “Not a wave of water,” he adds, “but a giant wave of hot plasma and magnetism.”
solar_tsunami_orangeThe spacecraft have also spotted waves crashing into other solar structures.
“We’ve seen the waves reflected by coronal holes. And there is a wonderful movie (at right) of a solar prominence oscillating after it gets hit by a wave (near the top of the image),” co-author Angelos Vourdilas of the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., said in a press release. “We call it a dancing prominence.”
Watching the waves interact with other things can reveal new information about the sun’s atmosphere, and help forecast when a coronal mass ejection or radiation storm will impact Earth.
wired.com
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