Coronal Mass Inflows
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Print media: 4-image montage: JPEG, High-res TIFF. |
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Caption: Solar physicists studying the Sun's outer corona are very familiar with plasma clouds taking off towards interplanetary space. So familiar, in fact, that the opposite phenomenon was not discovered until about a year after it was first recorded by the LASCO instrument on SOHO. The discovery that matter starts falling towards the Sun from heights of about 2.7 million kilometres was startling to everyone in this field of research.
About 8000 inflow events have now been logged - most of them since 1998 while the Sun has been at its most active, as judged by the high count of sunspots. Even with the powerful LASCO C2 coronagraph, the inflows are hard to detect among the much more prominent and much more frequent outflows and coronal mass ejections.
The coronal inflows are the subject of an article in the 20 November 2001 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, where the scientists who found them suggest that they are caused by frequent local adjustments of the Sun's magnetic field.
Related links:
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Instrument: |
LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph) |
Picture credits: |
SOHO/LASCO (ESA & NASA) |
