New Delhi: The data captured by Aditya L1 during the historic May 2024 solar storms was instrumental in studying the evolution of coronal mass ejections
or violent outbursts of plasma from the Sun as they interact with each other and move through interplanetary space. During such solar storms, the Sun violently dumps clouds of charged plasma or hot gas outwards into space, that have an influence on planets throughout the Solar System, causing outgassing on the Moon and stripping away the tenuous atmosphere of Mars. On Earth, they induce geomagnetic storms, with the extreme May 2024 storms now dubbed the Gannon Storms in memory of Jennifer Gannon, a prominent heliophysicist who passed away just before the storms.
NASA’s Heliophysics Fleet and Aditya L1. (Image Credit: ISRO/NASA).
These clouds of plasma carry with them the twisted magnetic fields of the Sun, that are described as ‘ropes’. Two coronal mass ejections interacted in space and squeezed each other, causing the magnetic field lines inside one of them to snap and rejoin. Such processes release tremendous amounts of energy on the surface of the Sun, but have never before been observed in interplanetary space. The sudden reversal in the magnetic field made the impact of the storm stronger than expected. Satellites tracked the increase in the energy of particles, confirming the magnetic reconnection.
Data from multiple satellites used for the study
The fleet of heliophysics observatories deployed by USA, Wind, ACE, THEMIS-C, STREO-A, MMS and DISCOVR along with Aditya L1 allowed scientists to study the extreme solar storm from multiple vantage points in space. The precise magnetic field measurements by Aditya L1 helped scientists mapped the magnetic reconnection, that stretched across 1.3 million kilometres, which is nearly 100 times the size of the Earth. This is the first time that such a massive reconnection was observed within a coronal mass ejection. The study helps scientists better predict the impact of solar storms. A paper describing the research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
