Posted on 09/03/2007 6:54:21 AM PDT by frithguild
Mysterious waves that help transport the sun's energy out into space have been detected by scientists for the first time.
Researchers hope their discovery of the energetic ripples, known as Alfven waves, will shed light on other solar phenomena such as the sun's magnetic fields and its super-hot corona, or outermost atmosphere. A new video shows the ripples in action.
"Alfven waves can provide us with a window into processes that are fundamental to the workings of the sun and its impacts on Earth," said Steve Tomczyk, a space scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Like a wave traveling along a string, Alfven waves run along the sun's magnetic field lines and reach deep into space. While astrophysicists have identified the waves far away from the sun, they've never been detected close to our star-the ripples were too small and too fast to spot.
To observe the elusive waves, Tomczyk and his colleagues pointed the coronal multichannel polarimeter (CoMP) instrument, located at the National Solar Observatory's Sacramento Peak Observatory in New Mexico, at the sun's hot, hazy corona. Thanks to CoMP's imaging speed of one picture every 15 seconds, the scientists captured the waves traveling at about 9 million mph (14.5 million kilometers per hour).
"The waves are visible all the time and they occur all over the corona, which was initially surprising to us," said Scott McIntosh, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The waves might help explain how energy is transferred to the sun's corona, which is millions of degrees hotter than the solar surface.
Tomczyk and his colleagues' findings will be detailed in the Aug. 30 online edition of the journal Science.
I believe one theory about the ripples was supercharged magnetic particles falling back to the surface causing “sunquakes”.
I also think it’s generally accepted that the outer atmosphere heating is an ultrasonic process. The sun is a noisy place with millions of nuclear explosions going off every second.
ping
Always interesting. Thanks.
That's a long winded way to say Sunspot, NM.
Thanks.
bump
The Electric Universe model grew from the realization that a new plasma cosmology and an understanding of electrical phenomena in space could illuminate the new work being done in comparative mythology. In return the images of events witnessed in the prehistoric sky and their sequence could help unravel the recent history of the Earth, Mars and Venus. By accepting data over a far wider span of knowledge and human existence than conventional cosmology allows, the Electric Universe model began to provide pragmatic and common sense answers to many questions that seem unrelated. It followed the entreaty of the Nobel Prize winning plasma physicist and cosmologist, Hannes Alfven, to work backwards in time from observations rather than forward from some idealized theoretical beginning.
"The waves are visible all the time and they occur all over the corona, which was initially surprising to us," said Scott McIntosh, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
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