A cosmic alignment and a little bit of spacecraft gymnastics has provided a ground-breaking measurement that is helping solve the 65-year-old cosmic mystery of why the sun's atmosphere is so hot.
The sun's atmosphere is called the corona. It consists of an electrically charged gas known as plasma and has a temperature of around one million degrees Celsius.
Both approaches have their advantages. Remote sensing shows the large-scale results but not the details of the processes happening in the plasma. Meanwhile, in-situ measurements give highly specific information about the small-scale processes in the plasma but do not show how this affects the large scale.
Daniele Telloni, researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics at the Astrophysical Observatory of Torino, is part of the team behind Solar Orbiter's Metis instrument. Metis is a coronagraph that blocks out the light from the sun's surface and takes pictures of the corona. It is the perfect instrument to use for the large-scale measurements and so Daniele began looking for times when Parker Solar Probe would line up.The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
As Daniele looked at the problem, he realized all it would take to bring Parker Solar Probe into view was a little bit of gymnastics with Solar Orbiter: a 45 degree roll and then pointing it slightly away from the sun. "This work is the result of contributions from many, many people," says Daniele, who led the analysis of the data sets. Working together, they were able to make the first combined observational and in-situ estimate of the coronal heating rate.
The specific way that turbulence does this is not dissimilar to what happens when you stir your morning cup of coffee. By stimulating random movements of a fluid, either a gas or a liquid, energy is transferred to ever smaller scales, which culminates in the transformation of energy into heat. In the case of the solar corona, the fluid is also magnetized and so stored magnetic energy is also available to be converted into heat.
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