ForumIAS announcing GS Foundation Program for UPSC CSE 2025-26 from 19 April. Click Here for more information.
ForumIAS Answer Writing Focus Group (AWFG) for Mains 2024 commencing from 24th June 2024. The Entrance Test for the program will be held on 28th April 2024 at 9 AM. To know more about the program visit: https://forumias.com/blog/awfg2024
Contents
Source: The post is based on the article “Astronomers spot a surprising solar eruption that maintains constant temperature” published in PIB on 12th June 2023
What is the News?
Scientists in India have found that a solar eruption that occurred in July 2017 has maintained its temperature for nearly six years.
What are Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs)?
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are large-scale eruptions of charged particles (plasma) and magnetic fields from the solar atmosphere into space.
They can disrupt a range of ground- and space-based technologies and satellites on Earth. Thus, it is crucial to understand their evolution and propagation through interplanetary space.
There is a wide range of plasma temperatures within CMEs, from cold chromospheric material (around 104 K) to hot plasma (around 107 K).
When CMEs propagate, several processes can exchange energy (electrical, kinetic, potential, thermal, and so on.), thereby heating or cooling the plasma.
To understand the underlying processes, it is important to study the evolution of thermodynamic properties (such as density, temperature, thermal pressure, etc.) of CMEs. This will help the human ability to monitor space weather.
What did the scientists find about Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs)?
Scientists have found that a solar eruption that occurred in July 2017 has maintained its temperature for nearly six years.
They observed that despite the core expanding, which would usually cause cooling, the temperature remained constant as it moved from 1.05 to 1.35 times the radius of the sun. They used data from ground-based and space-based instruments to support these findings.
Additionally, they observed that the density of the core decreased by about 3.6 times as it moved outward.
Based on these observations, the scientists concluded that the expansion of the core behaved more like an isothermal process (constant temperature) rather than an adiabatic process (where heat exchange occurs).
What are the future prospects of this discovery?
In the future, India’s Aditya-L1 mission, equipped with the visible emission line coronagraph (VELC), will provide more data about CMEs in the inner corona.
Analyzing this data will offer new insights into the evolution of CME properties in that region.
