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.
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