NASA researchers have cracked one of the Sun's many mysteries.
A solar flare that lasts minutes produces enough energy to power Earth for 20,000 years at a regular and quick rate.
According to NASA, fast magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon scientists have been attempting to comprehend for more than half a century. The space agency researchers may have finally figured it out.
IN SPACE - JUNE 5: In this handout image provided by NASA, the SDO satellite captures a ultra-high definition image of the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun at on June 5, 2012 from space. The last transit was in 2004 and the next pair of events will not happen again until the year 2117 and 2125.
NASA Researchers Unveil Sun's 60-Year-Old Mystery
The finding might lead to a greater understanding of processes that could have practical implications on Earth, such as nuclear fusion, which tries to harness the same energy as the Sun and stars. It might also help with more accurate forecasting of geothermal storms, which can disrupt electronic equipment like satellites.
"Ultimately, if we can understand how magnetic reconnection operates, then we can better predict events that can impact us at Earth, like geomagnetic storms and solar flares," said Barbara Giles, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a project scientist, E&T Magazine reported.
Yi-Hsin Liu, the study's lead author, claimed they've now figured out what causes the magnetic reconnection to happen quickly. She went on to say that they have a hypothesis that would explain everything.
In part, scientists have been baffled by fast magnetic reconnection because it occurs predictably. For a long time, Giles and the team of researchers have accepted that quick reconnection occurs at a predictable rate. But, she went on to say, what truly causes that rate is a mystery.
How Researchers Decoded Mystery
NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) scientists have created a hypothesis that describes the mechanisms that occur during fast magnetic reconnection, the fastest kind of magnetic reconnection. Researchers reported the study, "First-principles theory of the rate of magnetic reconnection in magnetospheric and solar plasmas," in the journal Nature Communications.
The space agency explained that magnetic reconnection happens in plasma, also known as the fourth state of matter. When gas is electrified enough to split its atoms, plasma occurs, leaving a jumble of negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions coexisting. This dynamic, fluid-like material is particularly sensitive to magnetic fields.
During fast magnetic reconnection, charged particles in a plasma, such as ions and electrons, stop moving in a group. As the ions and electrons begin to move apart, the Hall effect occurs, resulting in an unstable energy vacuum where reconnection occurs. The magnetic fields around the energy vacuum pressurize it, causing it to collapse, releasing massive amounts of energy at a predictable rate.
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