Researchers identify useful emission lines in the sun’s outer atmosphere

Phys.org  August 2, 2024 When studying the solar spectrum, researchers often search for emission spectra of two iron ions, Fe IX and Fe X, which are useful for studying the sun’s outer atmosphere. However, both spectra contain emission lines that cannot be matched with known electron transitions, limiting the information which can be gathered from them. A team of researchers in the US (Columbia University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, UC Berkeley) presented measurements made in the wavelength range 238–258 Å which helped them to identify the charge state associated with each of the observed lines. This wavelength range was of […]

Physicists Have Successfully Generated Tiny Solar Flares in The Lab

Science Alert  April 12, 2023 Solar observations detect energetic particles and hard X-rays but cannot reveal the generating mechanism because the particle acceleration happens at a scale smaller than the observation resolution. Thus, details of the cross-scale physics that explain the generation of energetic particles and hard X-rays remain a mystery. Researchers at Caltech set up a laboratory experiment toltage spike in braided magnetic flux ropes of a 2-eV plasma when the braid strand radius was choked down to be at the kinetic scale by either magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) kink or magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities. This sequence of hat simulates solar coronal […]