NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Shares Fist-Ever Peek Inside Coronal Mass Ejection As It Erupts From the Sun

NASA's Parker Solar Probe Shares Fist-Ever Peek Inside Coronal Mass Ejection as It Erupts From the Sun
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

In the past months, there has been a growing number of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) as the Sun ear its solar maximum. For the first time, researchers could glimpse what exactly happens inside a CME when it bursts from the Sun.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe Releases a Peek Inside a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has seen a CME emerge from the Sun and gotten a first-ever look inside it. What's within looks like a solar physicist's gold mine. The probe's Wide-field Imager captured clear, chaotic eddies within the CME for the Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) sensor, which detects visible light.

The eddies are known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) in physics. According to physicists, KHI events occur anytime a fast-moving fluid patch contacts another. When there is a difference in wind speed at one end of a cloud compared to the other, KHI happens in clouds on Earth.

Because the plasma in a CME flows against the background solar wind, solar physicists have deduced that KHI exists in CMEs. However, they didn't have the right tools to watch the phenomena in the right location.

"The turbulence that gives rise to KHI plays a fundamental role in regulating the dynamics of CMEs flowing through the ambient solar wind," said Evangelos Paouris, a solar physicist at George Mason University. Hence, understanding turbulence is key to achieving a deeper understanding of CME evolution and kinematics."

NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe on Aug. 12, 2018. From that point on, the probe's eccentric orbit has made it possible to go closer than ever to the solar corona, making it the first artificial object to do so. It is currently only 11.5 solar radii from the Sun's surface.

It is still outside of its ultimate orbit. The probe has flown past Venus several times in an attempt to accelerate and tighten its orbit around the Sun by harnessing the planet's gravity.

The probe will fly by Venus a seventh time in November of this year, narrowing its orbit around the Sun once more and enabling it to pass within 9.5 solar radii of the Sun in 2025 and beyond.

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What Are CMEs?

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are significant magnetic fields and plasma discharges from the Sun's corona. In addition to carrying an embedded magnetic field (frozen in flux) stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) intensity, they can release billions of tons of coronal debris.

With speeds ranging from less than 250 km/s to around 3000 km/s, CMEs leave the Sun in all directions. In as short as 15 -18 hours, the fastest Earth-directed CMEs can arrive on our planet. Slower CMEs may not come for several days.

When larger CMEs propagate away from the Sun, their size increases, and by the time they reach our planet, they can occupy about 25% of the space between it and the Sun.