Unprecedented Fine Structure of a Solar Flare Revealed by the 1.6 m New Big Bear Solar Telescope

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Scientists from NJIT's Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research are providing some of the first detailed views of the mechanisms that may trigger solar flares, colossal releases of magnetic energy in the Sun's corona that dispatch energized particles capable of penetrating Earth's atmosphere within an hour and disrupting orbiting satellites and electronic communications on the ground.

Recent images captured by the university's 1.6-meter New Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) have revealed the emergence of small-scale magnetic fields in the lower reaches of the corona the researchers say may be linked to the onset of a main flare. The study also includes the first scientific contributions from NJIT's newly commissioned Extended Owens Valley Solar Array (EOVSA).

"These smaller magnetic fields appear as precursors to the flare by reconnecting with each other -- breaking apart and forming new connections -- in an already stressed magnetic environment. This sets the stage for a larger energy release," notes Haimin Wang, distinguished professor of physics at NJIT and the leading author of a paper published this week in the magazine Nature Astronomy. The study, funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, was conducted in collaboration with colleagues in Japan and China.

"Through our measurements, we are able to see the emergence of fine magnetic channel structures prior to the flare, which contain mixed positive and negative magnetic polarities," Wang adds. "We then see a strong twist in the magnetic lines that creates instability in the system and may trigger the eruption."

While solar flares are generally believed to be powered by what is known as free energy -- energy stored in the corona that is released by twisting magnetic fields -- the authors suggest that the build-up of coronal energy in the upper atmosphere alone may not be sufficient to trigger a flare. In their study of a prolonged flare on June 22, 2015, they observed in unprecedented detail the emergence in the lower atmosphere of what they call precursors, or "pre-flare brightening's," in various wavelengths.

There are well-documented periods in which flares occur more frequently than the norm, but it has been difficult thus far to determine exactly when and where a particular flare might be initiated. The BBSO's recent study of a flare's magnetic evolution, enhanced by simultaneous microwave observations from EOVSA, has been able to pin down the time and location of the magnetic reconnection prior to the flare.

"Our study may help us predict flares with more precision," Wang says.

A co-author of the article, Kanya Kusano of Nagoya University, compared BBSO's observations with his numerical simulation of the triggering process of solar flares.

"I found that the observational result is very well consistent with the simulation," he notes. "This clearly indicates that these mixed-polarity magnetic channel structures are typical of the stressed magnetic field that triggers solar flares."

Large-scale planetary waves found on the sun

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have discovered Rossby waves on the sun. The large-scale planetary waves were first discovered on Earth.

On Earth, Rossby waves are correlated with local weather events. On the sun, scientists suggest the waves could influence solar activity and related phenomena, like sunspots and solar flares.

"The discovery of magnetized Rossby waves on the Sun offers the tantalizing possibility that we can predict space weather much further in advance," lead researcher Scott McIntosh said in a news release.

Rossby wave patterns are unique to rotating fluids, like the atmosphere and the ocean. The sun's upper layers are mostly plasma and rotate. Scientists have previously hypothesized that the sun could host Rossby waves, but observing wave patterns on the sun is difficult.

Researchers are able to pick out wave patterns on Earth using dozens of satellites and instruments, which observe physical phenomena from a variety of vantage points. Solar scientists are able to observe the sun from a single vantage point.

Recently, a trio of satellites and spacecraft offered astronomers varied solar perspectives. Researchers supplemented data collected by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a probe circling halfway between the sun and Earth, with observation from a pair of satellites with NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory mission.

"By combining the data from all three satellites we can see the entire sun and that's important for studies like this because you want the measurements to all be at the same time," explained Dean Pesnell, SDO project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "They're pushing the boundary of how we use solar data to understand the interior of the sun and where the magnetic field of the sun comes from."

In tracing the movements of coronal bright points on the sun's surface, researchers identified cohesive bands of magnetized activity -- Rossby-like waves moving across the solar surface. Researchers shared their discovery in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Scientists believe the waves could be linked with the 11-year solar cycle, as well as solar phenomena like coronal mass ejections and solar flares.

"It's possible that it's all tied together, but we needed to have a global perspective to see that," McIntosh said. "We believe that people have been observing the impacts of these Rossby-like waves for decades, but haven't been able to put the whole picture together."

Further research is needed to explore the predictive abilities of the newly discovered patterns. But first, scientists say they need better data.

"To connect the local scale with the global scale, we need to expand our view," McIntosh said. "We need a constellation of spacecraft that circle the Sun and monitor the evolution of its global magnetic field."

Electrification of sand on Titan and its influence on sediment movement

Experiments led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggest the particles that cover the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, are "electrically charged." When the wind blows hard enough (approximately 15 mph), Titan's non-silicate granules get kicked up and start to hop in a motion referred to as saltation. As they collide, they become frictionally charged, like a balloon rubbing against your hair, and clump together in a way not observed for sand dune grains on Earth -- they become resistant to further motion. They maintain that charge for days or months at a time and attach to other hydrocarbon substances, much like packing peanuts used in shipping boxes here on Earth.

The findings have just been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"If you grabbed piles of grains and built a sand castle on Titan, it would perhaps stay together for weeks due to their electrostatic properties," said Josef Dufek, the Georgia Tech professor who co-led the study. "Any spacecraft that lands in regions of granular material on Titan is going to have a tough time staying clean. Think of putting a cat in a box of packing peanuts."

The electrification findings may help explain an odd phenomenon. Prevailing winds on Titan blow from east to west across the moon's surface, but sandy dunes nearly 300 feet tall seem to form in the opposite direction.

"These electrostatic forces increase frictional thresholds," said Josh Méndez Harper, a Georgia Tech geophysics and electrical engineering doctoral student who is the paper's lead author. "This makes the grains so sticky and cohesive that only heavy winds can move them. The prevailing winds aren't strong enough to shape the dunes."

To test particle flow under Titan-like conditions, the researchers built a small experiment in a modified pressure vessel in their Georgia Tech lab. They inserted grains of naphthalene and biphenyl -- two toxic, carbon and hydrogen bearing compounds believed to exist on Titan's surface -- into a small cylinder. Then they rotated the tube for 20 minutes in a dry, pure nitrogen environment (Titan's atmosphere is composed of 98 percent nitrogen). Afterwards, they measured the electric properties of each grain as it tumbled out of the tube.

"All of the particles charged well, and about 2 to 5 percent didn't come out of the tumbler," said Méndez Harper. "They clung to the inside and stuck together. When we did the same experiment with sand and volcanic ash using Earth-like conditions, all of it came out. Nothing stuck."

Earth sand does pick up electrical charge when it's moved, but the charges are smaller and dissipate quickly. That's one reason why you need water to keep sand together when building a sand castle. Not so with Titan.

"These non-silicate, granular materials can hold their electrostatic charges for days, weeks or months at a time under low-gravity conditions," said George McDonald, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences who also co-authored the paper.

Visually, Titan is the object in the solar system most like Earth. Data gathered from multiple flybys by Cassini since 2005 have revealed large liquid lakes at the poles, as well as mountains, rivers and potentially volcanoes. However, instead of water-filled oceans and seas, they're composed of methane and ethane and are replenished by precipitation from hydrocarbon-filled clouds. Titan's surface pressure is a bit higher than our planet -- standing on the moon would feel similar to standing 15 feet underwater here on Earth.

"Titan's extreme physical environment requires scientists to think differently about what we've learned of Earth's granular dynamics," said Dufek. "Landforms are influenced by forces that aren't intuitive to us because those forces aren't so important on Earth. Titan is a strange, electrostatically sticky world."

Astronomers find unexpected, dust-obscured star formation in distant galaxy

Pushing the limits of the largest single-aperture millimetre telescope in the world, and coupling it with gravitational lensing, University of Massachusetts Amherst astronomer Alexandra Pope and colleagues report that they have detected a surprising rate of star formation, four times higher than previously detected, in a dust-obscured galaxy behind a Frontier Fields cluster.

As Pope explains, "This very distant, relatively typical galaxy is known to us, and we knew it was forming stars, but we had no idea what its real star-formation rate was because there is so much dust surrounding it. Previous observations couldn't reach past that. Finding out that 75 percent of its star formation was obscured by dust is remarkable and intriguing. These observations clearly show that we have more to learn."

She adds, "Historians want to know how civilizations were built up, and we astronomers want to know where and how the elements in the universe were formed and where everything is made of, came from." The study is accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

The new tool that has made such revelations possible is the 50-meter Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) which has been observing as a 32-meter telescope located on an extinct volcano in central Mexico in "early science mode" since 2013. Operated jointly by UMass Amherst and Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Optical y Electronica (INAOE), it offers astonishing new power to peer into dusty galaxies, the astrophysicist says.

Pope, an expert at analysing how dust masks star formation, says tracing dust-obscured galaxies at early epochs offers good signposts for understanding how the universe became enriched with metals over time. "We know at the basic level that metals are formed in stars, but the rate of build-up over cosmic time we don't know," she points out. "We know what we see today but we don't know how it came about, and we want to fill in that picture."

Overall, she and colleagues write, "This remarkable lower-mass galaxy showing signs of both low metallicity and high dust content may challenge our picture of dust production in the early universe."

Before the AzTEC camera on the LMT took observations of this galaxy, astronomers relied on Hubble Space Telescope images to study star formation, Pope says. But most star formation is obscured by dust, so the Hubble images could not make a complete census of the build-up of stars in this galaxy. "Previous millimetre observations have been limited to the most extreme dusty galaxies. With this study, we have detected a surprisingly high rate of dust-obscured star formation in a typical galaxy in the early universe."

With gravitational lensing, researchers use a foreground mass -- another galaxy or a galaxy cluster -- as a lens. As light from very distant, background galaxies passes through, it is magnified. "This technique offers a way to see things that are much fainter than your telescope can see," she notes. As traced in Hubble images, the lensed galaxy they studied in the Frontier Fields cluster showed it forming only about four solar masses of new stars per year, which is a "fairly typical" observation and unsurprising to astronomers today, Pope says. "But then the LMT observations revealed another 15 solar masses per year, which means we had been missing about three-quarters of the star formation going on."

She adds, "We are not yet at the level of detecting all of the star formation going on, but we are getting better. One of the big goals for us is to push observations at longer wavelengths and to trace these very dusty galaxies at early epochs. We are pushing observations in this direction and the fact that Hubble found only one quarter of the star formation in this distant normal galaxy is a huge motivation for doing a lot more studies like this."

As early as next year, Pope and her colleague Grant Wilson will install on the LMT a new state-of-the-art imaging system he is building, dubbed TolTEC. It will offer mapping speed 100 times faster than the LMT's current capability making it the fastest millimetre-wavelength polarimetric camera on Earth for conducting deep surveys of the universe, Wilson says. It should allow astronomers to create a census of star-forming galaxies, and observations that require five years to complete today will be done in a little over one week.

Pope says, "Currently, our census of dust-obscured star formation activity in galaxies is severely incomplete, especially in the distant universe. With TolTEC on the LMT, we will be able to make a complete census of dust-obscured star formation activity in galaxies over 13 billion years of cosmic time.

NASA to slam a spaceship into an asteroid for practice

NASA and the European Space Agency want to ram into an asteroid in a bid to save humanity from a “Deep Impact”-style catastrophe.

They want to see whether it’s possible to deflect a space rock from its course as part of a planetary defence mission.

Fears over potentially deadly asteroids are at an all time high after the White House issued an “emergency defence plan” in the event of a collision late last year.

Esteemed British astrophysicist and cosmologist Lord Martin Rees recently warned that the government should be spending “millions” on planetary defence.

The proposed mission will use two spacecraft, one to be launched by the ESA in 2020 and the other by NASA in 2021.

The first spaceship, dubbed AIM (for Asteroid Impact Mission) will orbit around 65803 Didymos, which was discovered in 1996.

The NASA spacecraft, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) will be timed to hit the rock a few months later, at a speed of nearly four miles per second.

AIM’s telescopes will monitor where stray pieces of rock end up.

The mission is to figure out whether deflection is the best defence from a stray space rock.

There’s a danger that crashing into the asteroid could cause fragments to break off and potentially speed up its trajectory.

The shrapnel could pose a risk to Earth, too.

“When we have a high-speed impact on an asteroid, you create a crater,” explained Andrew Cheng, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland said.

Cheng, who is lead investigator for the NASA side of the project, told Cosmos: “You blow pieces back in the direction you came from.”

The mission is yet to get the green light as it waits to confirm funding.

But planetary defence is a hot topic among scientists.

NASA have previously warned that Earth is “due an extinction level attack”.

But there’s little in place to stop one from causing absolute mayhem.

On the bright side, asteroids fly by Earth regularly and most are small enough to burn up in the atmosphere, completely unnoticed.

There's a Massive, Glowing Blob in the Universe, and a Mystery Source Is Lighting It Up

Astronomers have discovered a vast, glowing blob of gas in the distant Universe, and they can't figure out what's actually lighting it up.

This glowing nebula is located at the centre of an enormous 'protocluster' of early galaxies some 10 billion light-years from Earth, and is the brightest cosmic object of its kind ever found. And yet, there's no obvious source of its power.

The object, called an 'enormous Lyman-alpha nebula' (ELAN), is not only the brightest object of its kind found in the Universe - it's also one of the biggest, rivalling even the 'Slug Nebula', which stretches 2 million light-years through intergalactic space.

"It's extremely bright, and it's probably larger than the Slug Nebula, but there's nothing else visible except the faint smudge of a galaxy," says one of team, J. Xavier Prochaska, from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"So it's a terrifically energetic phenomenon without an obvious power source."

Only a handful of ELANs have been discovered so far, and these accumulations of gas are thought to be part of a network of filaments that connect neighbouring galaxies to each other in the vast cosmic web of the Universe.

While other ELANs appear to be powered by the intense radiation given off by quasars, star formation, or supernovae, no such events could be found near this latest example, dubbed the MAMMOTH-1 nebula.

What we do know is the light has the same wavelength that's absorbed and emitted by hydrogen atoms as they cool down - a discharge known as Lyman-alpha radiation - but it's not clear what's been heating them up.

The find recalls a discovery in 2000 of another ELAN, known as the Lyman-alpha blob 1, located in the southern constellation of Aquarius, some 11.5 billion light-years from Earth.

Stretching three times larger than our own Milky Way galaxy, this thing is ginormous and extremely green, but to this day, no one can say what's illuminating it.

Scientists have suggested that supermassive black holes swallowing matter in galaxies within the central region of the blob could be responsible, and now the team behind this new discovery suspect the same thing is happening to the MAMMOTH-1 nebula.

The MAMMOTH-1 nebula was found by a survey called Mapping the Most Massive Over densities Through Hydrogen (MAMMOTH), which was also responsible for finding the Slug Nebula back in 2014.

The protocluster it's found in is massive, hosting an unusually high concentration of galaxies in an area of about 50 million light-years across - all bound together by gravity.

While the galaxies are now mature, our telescopes are only just seeing them as they would have looked a mere 3 billion years after the Big Bang - the peak of galaxy formation in our Universe.

Several hypotheses have been put forward for how the MAMMOTH-1 nebula at the heart of this great protocluster got so bright, but the most likely ones revolve around radiation or discharges coming from something called an active galactic nucleus (AGN).

AGNs are compact regions at the centre of galaxies that have a much higher than normal luminosity. The team explains that AGNs are powered by a supermassive black hole actively feeding on gas in the centre of a galaxy, and are known for being extremely bright sources of light.

The intense radiation emitted by AGNs ionise the hydrogen gas in the space around it, and this could prompt the ELANs to emit super-bright Lyman-alpha radiation.

Quasars - the brightest objects in the Universe - are known for being the most luminous AGNs in visible light, except the MAMMOTH-1 nebula is not associated with a quasar, as far as the researchers can tell.

But that doesn't mean there isn't one lurking in the background.

"It has all the hallmarks of an AGN, but we don't see anything in our optical images. I expect there's a quasar that is so obscured by dust that most of its light is hidden," Prochaska says.

The team has its work cut out for it in trying to spot a single quasar some 10 billion light-years from Earth, and until then, the brightest known ELAN will remain a cosmic mystery.

The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, and you can read it in full at the pre-print website, arXiv.org.

What Cassini's Daring Ring-Dive Around Saturn Could Tell Us About Uranus

Glowing in pale blue, Uranus looks like a ghostly planet in pictures taken from the only spacecraft to ever visit it: Voyager 2. Due to the planet's great distance from Earth, follow-up studies of the planet began only in the late 1990s when telescope optics improved. Since then, Uranus has remained a low priority for observational institutions.

That's unfortunate for scientists looking to learn more about the faint rings of Uranus, discovered 40 years ago this year. Two airborne campaigns were set up to watch Uranus pass in front of a star in 1977. And both were taken aback when they found rings circling the planet. One of the teams missed three of the rings because they were so surprised by the find.

There are hopes that a spacecraft will fly to Uranus or Neptune in the 2020s or 2030s. NASA is undertaking early-stage feasibility studies. So it will remain to the plucky Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn since 2004, to show scientists what it can about the rings of Uranus by analogy with Saturn.

"At the time of the Uranian discovery, we had never seen narrow, dense rings before," said Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer at the Search for Extra terrestrial Intelligence Institute. "The narrow rings of Saturn behave similarly to the rings of Uranus," he added, "so that has enabled us to understand dense rings a little bit better."

Cassini is in the final year of its epic mission, and is taking a rare close look at Saturn's rings in the coming weeks. The spacecraft is in the midst of performing 20 "ring-grazing orbits" that will allow for the best views of them since Cassini's arrival in 2004. The manoeuvres began in November and run through April.

"[W]e expect to see the rings, along with the small moons and other structures embedded in them, as never before," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement. "The last time we got this close to the rings was during arrival at Saturn in 2004, and we saw only their backlit side. Now we have dozens of opportunities to examine their structure at extremely high resolution on both sides."

Following completion of the ring orbits, Cassini will perform unprecedented dives between Saturn and its rings between April and September. Then, on September 15, Cassini will make a suicidal plunge into Saturn itself to protect icy worlds like Enceladus from the small chance of Cassini crashing into and contaminating their surfaces.

But before that, Showalter points out, Cassini will provide more insights on what is happening within the Uranus system, even though the spacecraft is surveying a completely different planet. The wobbles in Saturn's narrow rings appear to move in similar ways that Uranian rings do, for example.

But there are still several mysteries that may take another Uranian mission to resolve.

For example, images from Voyager 2 depicted dust rings surrounding the main ring system of. Then, when Uranus reached its equinox (closest point in its orbit) in 2008, observations from the Keck Telescope imaged the rings when they were edge-on from Earth, making it easier to identify the presence of any dust. It appears that the dust has shifted 3,100 miles between the two observations, Showalter said. The reason for the shift remains poorly understood.

Another open question is the role that the moons Cornelia and Ophelia play in shepherding the outer ring of Uranus — a phenomena also seen around Saturn. But the rings around Uranus are more difficult to observe right now because the planet is in an area of the sky with fewer stars, Showalter said, meaning the planet remains obscure more than it did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Showalter has been very busy in the past few years working on both the New Horizons mission, which passed by Pluto in 2015, as well as Cassini. He says he hopes to pull out some older data on Uranus soon to learn more about the planet's ring system, and to provide some insight for whenever a spacecraft does visit the Blue World again.