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A series of gigantic but eerily faint plasma loops temporarily rose above the surface of our star after a powerful solar flare exploded from the sun on Monday, stunning new photographs show.
These loops linger as ghostly echoes of the departed solar storm, but scientists still don’t know exactly how the ethereal remnants take shape.
On Monday (January 29), a powerful 6.8 magnitude M-class aircraft solar flare – the second highest class of solar flares behind class spaceweather.com.
Before solar flares explode onto the sun, large loops of ionized gas, or plasma, often rise above the sun’s surface like giant horseshoes. These plasma loops, or prominencesThey are held in place by the magnetic field lines of dark sunspotswhich eventually breaks like a rubber band when solar flares explode, launching the looping plasma into space as a coronal mass ejection (CME).
The recent stellar explosion launched a CME that was predicted to lightly graze Earth’s magnetic field on February 1. But he ended up getting us completely wrong, according to spaceweather.com.
Related: 15 dazzling images of the sun
However, shortly after Monday’s M-class flare, astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau broke a marvelous photo of faint loops of plasma rising above the solar surface right where the CME had exploded. These loops are puzzling, since, in theory, all the plasma in the area should have been ejected into space as a CME.
The logic-defying structures are known as post-flare loops (PFLs) and only appear when the sun is viewed with a special filter that enhances the red wavelengths of light emitted by hydrogen, known as H-alpha. according POT.
PFLs are most commonly observed after class M and 2005 study. It is not clear how high the most recent loops were.
Astronomers have seen these bright arcs on the Sun before and have even We have seen them following explosions from nearby stars.. The structures are much fainter than the bulges that appear before a solar flare because they contain smaller amounts of plasma that are much colder and therefore emit less light. As a result, few PFL images capture the phenomenon in as much detail as Poupeau’s new photograph.
Related: 10 solar storms that will devastate us in 2023
Although researchers frequently document it, there is still some confusion about how PFLs form. Initially, researchers believed that the plasma comes from the solar surface and fills in the magnetic field lines after they recover from the snap. However, more recent observations suggest that the magnetic loops may actually be retracting some of the plasma that has been ejected into space by solar flares, according to spaceweather.com.
The sun is currently approaching explosive peak in its roughly 11-year solar cycleknown as solar maximum, which is It is likely to arrive before the end of the year.. As a result, the The frequency and power of solar flares are increasing rapidly..
For example, on December 31, 2023, a Monstrous solar flare X5 emerged from the sun — the most powerful solar explosion in six years. And on January 22, an extremely rare double solar flare burst from opposite sides of our local star.
Due to increasing solar activity, there will be many more PFLs in the coming years, which could shed light on how exactly they form, according to Spaceweather.com.
This story was provided by sister site Space.com. Living science.