Like many stars, the sun is prone to sudden outbursts. Erupting from the star's surface, these events sometimes sling globs of charged particles and sun-stuff in Earth's direction. If they're powerful enough, these coronal mass ejections can produce geomagnetic storms that damage satellites and disrupt power grids.
Though we've known about such eruptions for centuries (the most powerful on record occurred in 1859 and is known as the Carrington Event), scientists haven't had a good handle on the mechanics behind the eruptions.
Now, astrophysicist Tahar Amariof the Polytechnic School in Palaiseau, France and his colleagues have used a combination of solar observations and sophisticated calculations to trace the evolution and eruption of a coronal mass ejection. The team did this by studying four days of observations gathered by two space-based satellites and an Earth-based observatory in 2006. The observations preceded a coronal mass ejection. Then, the team combined those observations with a computer program that could trace the activity of individual magnetic elements near the sun's surface.
Amari and his colleagues found that preexisting, twisted magnetic filaments simmering near the sun's surface suddenly ballooned outward from an area of magnetic instability, producing kinetic energy that catapulted matter into space. The modeling helps resolve an ongoing debate about whether eruptions arise from magnetic ropes that are already on the sun's surface, or whether those ropes are produced during the events.
The research, which the team published this week in*Nature *and is featured on the journal's cover, resulted in several spectacular figures illustrating the formation of these solar slingshots. Flip through the gallery above to see some of these.
