© LV4260/Getty ImagesAn artist's impression of a coronal mass ejection.
Astronomers using one of the most sensitive arrays of radio telescopes in the world
have caught a huge storm erupting on the sun and observed material flung from it at more than 3000 kilometres a second, a massive shockwave and phenomena known as herringbones.In the
journal Nature Astronomy, Diana Morosan from the University of Helsinki in Finland and her colleagues report detailed observations of the huge storm, a magnetic eruption known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).
Unlike the herringbones a biologist might find while dissecting, well, a herring, the team found a data-based version while dissecting the radio waves emitted during the violent event.
The shape of the fish skeleton emerged when they plotted the frequencies of radio waves as the CME evolved. The spine is a band of emission at a constant frequency, while the vertical offshoot "bones" on either side were sudden short bursts of radiation at a much wider range of frequencies.
Herringbones have been found in the sun's radio-wave entrails before, but this is the first time that such a sensitive array of radio telescopes has recorded them. The detailed data enabled Morosan and colleagues for the first time to pin down the origin of the radiation bursts.
To their surprise, the bones were being created in three different locations, on the sides of the CME.
"I was very excited when I first saw the results, I didn't know what to make of them," Morosan says.
Comment: NASA has documented a sharp uptick in NEOs which potentially pose a threat to civilization, but more concerning are these that we have yet to detect. As noted in the article Earth enters densest stream of deadly Taurid meteor cluster this June: And if an asteroid the size of that in Tunguska struck over a major city it would cause mass mortality.
See also:
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- Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes
- Meteor fireball sighted in 5 countries in Europe, photographed by 3 sky cameras
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