solar waves tagged posts

Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in solar physics by providing the first direct evidence of small-scale torsional Alfvén waves in the sun’s corona—elusive magnetic waves that scientists have been searching for since the 1940s.

The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, was made using unprecedented observations from the world’s most powerful solar telescope, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii.

The findings could finally explain one of the sun’s greatest mysteries—how its outer atmosphere, the corona, reaches temperatures of millions of degrees while its surface is only around 5,500°C.

Alfvén waves, named after Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén who predicted their existence in 1942, are magnetic disturbances tha...

A view of a sunspot on the solar surface, visible here as a dark collection of plasma with magnetic field strengths similar to those found in modern hospital MRI machines. However, it is the size of the sunspot, which is comparable to that of our own Earth (see the scale Earth depicted in the lower-right corner), that gives these structures immense power and energy. The recent work published in Nature Physics reveals first-time evidence for how a rare breed of magnetic waves, which originate within the centre of sunspots, can form shockwaves that heat the surrounding plasma by thousands of degrees. Credit: Image courtesy of Queen’s University, Belfast

Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have led an international team to the ground-breaking discovery that magnetic waves crashing throug...