Agency, New Delhi.
Published by: Dev Kashyap
Updated Fri, 11 Mar 2022 06:26 AM IST
Summary
A team of researchers from India and England, led by astronomers at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has explained the origin of the Sun’s ‘spicules’. The team used three supercomputers from India to run massively parallel scientific code.
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Expansion
A team of researchers from India and England, led by astronomers at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has explained the origin of the Sun’s ‘spicules’. The team used three supercomputers from India to run massively parallel scientific code. According to the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the processes by which plasma is supplied to the solar wind and the solar atmosphere heat up to one million degrees Celsius.
Plasma is the fourth state of matter, in which electrically charged particles exist and reside everywhere in the Sun’s chromosphere (the layer just above the Sun’s visible surface). The second of the three major layers of the Sun’s atmosphere is the chromosphere, which is between three and five thousand km deep. It appears red.
voice heard through audio speaker
While understanding the mathematics of spicule dynamics, the team took the help of an audio speaker. Through this, they react to disturbances or stimuli produced at low frequencies, similar to the sound of thunder heard in movies. When a liquid is placed on such a speaker and music is started, the free surface of the liquid becomes unstable and begins to vibrate. In research published in the journal Nature Physics, scientists investigated the role of the magnetic field on the Sun using state-of-the-art numerical simulations of solar plasma. In addition, the role of polymer chains was also explored using slow motion videography on Faraday waves in parallel polymeric solutions.
Plasma feels like boiling water
Scientists said that the plasma is in a state of convection just below the solar surface (the photosphere) and looks like boiling hot water on the lower surface. It is powered by nuclear power in the hot-dense core. This convection occurs for a fixed period of time, but it strongly pushes the plasma into the solar chromosphere. The chromosphere is 500 times lighter than the plasma in the photosphere. Hence these strong shocks rising from the bottom expel the chromospheric plasma outwards at ultrasonic speed in the form of thin columns (spicules).