![]() ![]() What recent advances led to your team’s developments (or a new synthesis of previous developments)? Read their complete paper in Geophysical Research Letters. AGU spoke with Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics editor Larry Kepko about his team’s new research into the composition and origin of this leisurely “slow” solar wind. But some of that soup moves at a comparative crawl. Which may be the reason NASA disabled comments on the last video it published of a coronal Now that u mention it, it does feel a little cold today.Earth is relentlessly barraged by the solar wind, a soup of plasma that spews from the Sun at up to 1.7 million miles per hour. Conspiracy!ĭespite the assurances, there are some people convinced the ‘the end is nigh’ and various websites are claiming there is a conspiracy and a cover-up.Ĭonspiracy theorists are less convinced that the gigantic coronal hole is benign, rather asking if it could be a sign that the sun is disintegrating. The latest coronal hole footage shows an anomaly that covers almost half of the sun’s visible disk and between 10 and 20 per cent of the sun’s actual surface area. Last October’s coronal hole was roughly the size of 50 Earths, but was still much smaller than the current hole. Older footage shows a much smaller hole in the same area. In October last year, NASA released images recorded by the SDO that showed a coronal hole in the same area of the sun as the latest coronal footage. The SDO has been observing coronal holes and the sun itself for six years and in that time it has witnessed and recorded an array of solar features and coronal holes. The $US800 million SDO project was launched in 2010 with the mission of helping NASA better understand both the sun and its influence on both Earth and the space surrounding it. “Coronal holes are visible in certain types of extreme ultraviolet light, which is typically invisible to our eyes, but is colorised here in purple for easy viewing.” “These coronal holes are important to understanding the space environment around Earth through which our technology and astronauts travel,” NASA said. So it appears that this troubling development is just a slightly cooler part of the enormous, unimaginably hot ball of gas that sits at the centre of our solar system. “While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, without looping back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere,” NASA said. The health of our sun has been an obsession for man for centuries. Watch NASA’s footage of the coronal hole:īefore you head for the shelter and start planning for the apocalypse, or start spending your savings on woolly jumpers in preparation for a new ice age, NASA has assured us that despite the stream of heated particles flying into the atmosphere, the anomaly poses no real risk to Earth. The high-speed winds responsible for the sun’s coronal holes send the star’s particles off at speeds three times faster than solar wind. “Because they contain little solar material, they have lower temperatures and thus appear much darker than their surroundings.”Īnd as the gap grows, the sun’s magnetic field is allowing heat from the star to escape into space. “Coronal holes are low-density regions of the sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona,” NASA explained. ![]()
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