A solar flare has reached the edge of the solar system

NASA

Photo of the sun at different wavelengths

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A fleet of spacecraft, scattered throughout the solar system, has provided the most comprehensive information on the progress of solar storms in the solar system and the radiation that is created in such eruptions.

The solar storms of October-November 2003, which were nicknamed the "Halvin storms", threw billions of tons of ionized gas (plasma) into space. The eruptions hit Earth within a day and passed Mars several hours later. The latest reports on their progress come from the two Voyager spacecraft, which are at the edge of the solar system near an unknown region, where vortices form in the solar wind as it collides with the faint gas between the stars.

The material, blown into space by the huge solar storms last fall, reached Earth at a speed of eight million kilometers per hour and continued its race through spacecraft around Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, before reaching Voyager. The material, which meanwhile slowed to an average speed of 1.5 million kilometers per hour as it passed through the heliosphere, reached Voyager 2 on April 28 after a journey of 11 billion kilometers from the Sun and continued towards Voyager 1, which is about 14.5 billion kilometers from the Sun.

The Halloween storms were the strongest storms ever recorded. The storms broke records in the intensity of their X-rays, the speed of the thrown material and its temperature around the Earth. These storms make up about a third of all the particle radiation emitted by the sun in the last decade in the energy range of 30-50 MaU, even though the solar activity cycle has long passed its peak.

There are at least two types of effects from solar storms: radiation and the surface waves, which accelerate ionized particles. The radiation travels at very close to the speed of light, and has a serious electrical effect on satellites, the electrically charged upper layer of Earth's atmosphere (ionosphere), and long-range radio communications. The radiation was detected in the solar system in the field of radio waves a short time (or several hours in the case of Cassini, which is located near Saturn) after the occurrence of each storm. The shock waves, which accelerate ions to speeds of millions of kilometers per hour, take longer to develop, but carry the most powerful punch, hitting power plants and energetic particles trapped in Earth's Huan-Allen radiation belts. The recent storms created a new radiation belt near the Earth, which lasted for several weeks.

The impact of the storms on Earth was strong enough to cause airplanes to change course, affect the operation of satellites and cause a power outage in Malmö, Sweden. Long-range radio communications were disrupted as a result of the storms' effects on the ionosphere, and northern lights were also seen at southern latitudes such as in the Florida region. Fortunately, thanks to advanced design and engineering, NASA's satellites, located close to Earth, were not seriously damaged. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) cut back on some of their planned activities and took shelter in the Russian utility unit several times during the storms.

Not only Earth felt the effects of the storms - they shook the inner solar system from Mars to Saturn. The MARIE (Mars Radiation Environment Experiment) test facility, which is on board the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, was out of order due to the effect of radiation in the orbit of Mars. The MARIE facility successfully measured radiation in space to assess the risks to astronauts on future missions to Mars, before it shut down during a stormy period on the Sun on October 28, 2003. The Ulysses spacecraft, located near Jupiter, and the Cassini spacecraft, located near Saturn, both detected radio waves, originating from storms. magnetism, created when the shock waves hit the giant magnetic fields around the giant planets.

"It's amazing that this shock wave was strong enough to create a magnetic storm, which would reach as far as Saturn, a distance from the Sun almost ten times greater than that of Earth," said Dr. Edward Stone of Latakia and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The shock waves, created by storms in the inner solar system, not only accelerated electrons and protons to high energies, but also trapped these particles in the inner heliosphere. As a result, the radiation levels increased in the entire area from Venus to Mars, and they gradually decreased only after a period of several weeks. Such an event would have significant implications for the requirements to protect researchers, who would reach beyond the Earth's protective magnetosphere (its magnetic field) from radiation.

"Over many decades, improvements in weather forecasting have saved lives and property. "Space weather forecasting is still in the early stages of development, but it is a necessary field for protecting space infrastructure, astronauts and robotic missions," said Carl Wells, astronaut and director of the Advanced Concepts and Project Prometheus program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The fleet of spacecraft, scattered throughout the solar system, is helping scientists piece together a more comprehensive picture of how disturbances in the solar system progress. The scientists do not fully understand the factors that determine the development of the shape of the shock waves and the change in their speed in different directions. The different arrival times and speeds of the shock waves to Earth and Mars raise the possibility that this is not a simple process. The sun's magnetic field also affects the connectivity between different places in the solar system. Understanding the movement of the wave waves from particle accelerators in the solar system will help us in understanding and predicting the change in radiation levels in different places in space. These spacecraft, scattered throughout the solar system, provide some of the first information about the path of storms in the interplanetary "ocean".

In the coming months, the shock waves will collide with the heliosphere - the defined boundary of the heliosphere, where the material emitted from the sun piles up after colliding with the interstellar wind, which comes from the explosions of nearby stars. This collision may produce extremely low frequency radio signals. The discovery of these signals will give us a better understanding of the exact size of the space, which is in the domain of the sun. The energy carried by the material will give the interstellar gas a boost, which will throw it to a distance of 640 million kilometers, four times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Translation: Dikla Oren

The Earth got off cheap - the solar flares from a few months ago continue to reverberate throughout the solar system

By Warren Leary, Haaretz, Walla News!

Solar flare, October 2003. Billions of tons of gas were blown out at a speed of more than 8 million km/h

Photo: IP

The shock waves from the solar flares that occurred at the end of 2003 and caused very minor damage to the Earth are now close to the edge of the solar system, and on their way have caused disturbances and surprising phenomena in other planets. This is what scientists reported last Thursday.

In eruptions, radio, X-ray and gamma rays and electrically charged particles are emitted from the sun in a tremendous burst, equivalent to the eruption of 10 million volcanoes. In October and November 2003, more than ten eruptions occurred, including the strongest eruption measured to date.

"The eruptions combined with each other and created a tremendous wave throughout the solar system," explained Dr. Eric Christian from the Solar Physics Division at NASA in a conversation with journalists. According to Christian and his colleagues, the intensity of the eruptions caused billions of tons of gas to be released into space at a speed of more than eight million kilometers per hour. This is the highest speed ever measured in the solar region.

The shock waves created by the eruptions merged and formed a single front, advancing towards the edge of the solar system at a speed of 2.4 million km/h. "As you move away from the sun, the waves merge with each other and a cumulative effect is created," said Dr. Edward Stone of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The eruptions caused only minor damage on Earth. One of the reasons for this is that the strongest shock waves did not move towards Earth. Nevertheless, some satellites were disrupted; The astronauts on the International Space Station had to find temporary shelter in the more protected areas of the station; And airlines were forced to change the routes of planes flying near the poles.

The reverberating wave of eruptions reached as far as Mars and continued from there to other planets. One of the waves hit the device for measuring radiation in the Odyssey spacecraft, which orbits Mars, but the spacecraft managed to record how the advancing wave tears the thin layer of atmosphere surrounding Mars and pulls part of it into space with it. "A significant portion of the upper atmosphere has reached space," said Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. According to him, this phenomenon may explain why Mars has lost so much of its atmosphere and water over the course of 3.5 billion years.

Dr. Stone said that as the last wave of eruptions moved toward the edge of the solar system, it created a disturbance in the magnetic field surrounding Jupiter and caused a large amount of radio waves to be emitted for a week, which was picked up by the Ulysses spacecraft. The moving front of the eruptions caused a similar phenomenon as it approached Saturn, and in April it was detected by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is 11 billion kilometers from the Sun. Later in July, the wave of eruptions is expected to pass near the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is about 15 billion kilometers from the Sun.

The forecast is that by the end of this year, or early next year, the wave will reach the edge of the solar system, a distance of about five billion kilometers beyond Voyager 1. The edge of the solar system, known as the heliosphere, is the boundary between the region affected by solar radiation and the place where interstellar space begins .

According to Dr. Stone, astrophysicists expect the wave to temporarily push the heliospheric boundary to a distance of nearly 650 million kilometers. Within a year or two the border will return to its normal state.

The press release from NASA
The solar knower

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