(ORDO NEWS) — The American solar probe Parker Solar Probe for the first time in history flew through the base of a coronal ejection and received the first information about the properties of its matter during one of the approaches of this apparatus to the Sun.
“For the first time, we measured the properties of particles and fields in the vicinity of the base of a CME that the Parker Solar Probe passed through during its approach to the Sun.
At that moment, the spacecraft was only 14 solar radii from the surface of the star.
The results of these measurements suggest that The base of the solar plasma ejection is very different in properties from all other parts of it,” the researchers write.
The Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission was launched in August 2018 to solve one of the most ambitious tasks in the history of astronomy and astronautics – approaching the Sun as close as possible: approximately six million kilometers.
Ultimately, the work of the PSP will end with an immersion in the hot atmosphere of the star, which will happen, as scientists expect, in the middle of this decade.
According to NASA‘s current plans, this device will fly through the corona of the star 24 times, gradually approaching the surface of the Sun.
The Parker Solar Probe is equipped with a thermal shield made of carbon fiber material 11 centimeters thick and several meters wide, which will protect it from destruction during these encounters with the luminary.
Probe’s first flyby of a coronal mass ejection
The mission science team, led by David McComas, a professor at Princeton University (USA), discovered during the analysis of data collected during the PSP’s tenth approach to the Sun in November 2021 that, as part of this event, the probe flew through the base of the coronal plasma ejection and passed inside approximately two hours.
Similar emissions of solar matter often generate geomagnetic storms, and also pose a threat to the orbital constellation of satellites in Earth‘s orbit.
As astronomers note, the “rendezvous” of the American probe and the coronal ejection gave scientists a unique opportunity to study the structure of solar plasma clusters ejected from the star’s atmosphere as a result of complex processes in its magnetic field.
Of particular value to the researchers was the fact that the Parker Solar Probe encountered a coronal ejection at a minimum distance from the Sun, even before the structure of the solar plasma cloud could change as a result of its interactions with the interplanetary medium.
The scientists found that the low-energy heavy and light ions that are usually present in the solar wind and at the ejection head are almost completely absent inside the base of the ejection.
In addition, astronomers did not find sharp differences in the strength, direction, and other properties of the magnetic field at the boundary between open space and the base of the ejection, which is also not typical for other studied manifestations of solar activity.
While scientists cannot explain these anomalies, they suggest that they are potentially related to the fact that the Parker Solar Probe flew only along the edge of the base of the ejection and did not cross its central parts.
New flybys of the PSP through the vicinity of the Sun will give a more accurate answer to this question, concluded Professor McComas and his colleagues.
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