Scientists at Queen’s University, Belfast led an international team to the ground-breaking discovery that magnetic waves, crashing through the Sun, may be key to heating its atmosphere and propelling the solar wind. The study was published in the journal Nature Physics in March 2018.
In 1942, Swedish physicist and engineer Hannes Alfven predicted the existence of a type of wave due to magnetism acting on a plasma. The waves, subsequently named as Alfven waves, help the Sun maintain its extremely high temperatures. Although scientists, across the globe, have predicted that these waves travel upwards from the solar surface to break the higher layers, releasing huge amounts of energy, there was no evidence till now on the role of these waves in heating the Sun.
Advanced high-resolution observations from the Dunn Solar Telescope in New Mexico and other complementary observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory were used to analyse the strongest magnetic fields that appear in sunspots. The researchers broke down the Sun’s light into its constituent colours and examined the behaviour of certain elements, including calcium and iron, within the solar atmosphere. After researchers managed to extract these elements, they detected intense flashes of light in the image sequences with all the traits of the Alfven waves, converting energy into shock waves. This research opens up a new window to understanding how this phenomenon could potentially work in other areas such as energy reactors and medical devices.