Science Nugget: Shocks in tandem: Solar Orbiter observes a fully formed forward-reverse shock pair in the inner heliosphere

18 December 2024

The Sun is an active star, responsible for creating a highly dynamic and complex environment, namely the heliosphere. Solar eruptive phenomena are key consequences of such activity, which recently reached the peak of its 11-years cycle, and their study is of paramount importance to understand many unsolved mysteries of how energy is converted... read more

Science Nugget: High-Energy Insights from an Escaping Coronal Mass Ejection

11 December 2024

Solar eruptive events, consisting of both solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), represent some of the most energetically dynamic phenomena in our solar system. These events involve the rapid release of magnetic energy, which is converted into plasma heating, particle acceleration, and kinetic energy driving the CME. Understanding... read more

Science nugget: Investigation of Venus plasma tail using spacecraft flybys

4 December 2024

Venus lacks a global magnetic field but generates an induced magnetosphere through its interaction with the solar wind. This interaction has been studied mainly close to the planet while the far tail has been less sampled. While the main objectives of Solar Orbiter are related to the Sun and the solar wind, the mission also provides a bonus... read more

Science nugget: Testing the Flux Expansion Factor – Solar Wind Speed Relation with Solar Orbiter data

27 November 2024 The presence of “open” magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere is associated with magnetic flux tubes evolving into solar wind streams subject to the “frozen-in” condition of plasmas. In this study, we statistically test the v - f anticorrelation, exploiting the Solar Orbiter capability to sample a broader range of radial distances compared... read more

Science nugget: The role of small scale EUV brightenings in the quiet Sun coronal heating

20 November 2024 How the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, namely the solar corona, is maintained to a temperature of more than 1 MK, about 1000 times the photosphere, is an unsolved problem of paramount importance in heliophysics. Observations of impulsive emissions showed that the ones associated with the largest energy scales (from 10^26 to 10^32 erg)... read more

New full Sun views show sunspots, fields and restless plasma

20 November 2024 Zoom into Solar Orbiter's four new Sun images, assembled from high-resolution observations by the spacecraft's PHI and EUI instruments made on 22 March 2023. The PHI images are the highest-resolution full views of the Sun's visible surface to date, including maps of the Sun's messy magnetic field and movement on the surface. These can be... read more

Science nugget: Improved Insights from the Suprathermal Ion Spectrograph on Solar Orbiter

13 November 2024 Energetic ions and electrons accelerated at the Sun can be directly injected into interplanetary space through magnetic “interchange” reconnection between a closed coronal loop and an open magnetic field line. Half a century ago, these transient events, most often associated with impulsive X-ray flares, were observed to produce extreme... read more

The solar cycle, a heartbeat of stellar energy

4 November 2024 The Sun follows a roughly 11-year rhythm of waking up and becoming very active before calming down again, a stellar beat known as the solar cycle. This affects Earth because it shapes space weather, determining how much radiation, magnetic field and particles the Sun flings out into space and towards our planet. read more

Science nugget: Temporally resolved Type III solar radio bursts in the frequency range 3-13 MHz

30 October 2024 The Sun is one of the strongest radio sources in the sky producing several kinds of radio emissions differing in characteristics, intensity and mechanism of production. Type III radio bursts are the most common coherent radio emission produced by the Sun. They are characterized by a rapid drift in time towards lower frequencies and represent an... read more

Science nugget: Resolving proton and alpha beams for improved understanding of plasma kinetics: SWA-PAS observations

23 October 2024 A crucial step in unraveling the mechanisms behind wave-particle interactions, which drive the heating and acceleration of solar wind particles, lies in the detailed analysis of the non-Maxwellian characteristics of the particle velocity distribution function (VDF). Features such as temperature anisotropies and particle beams offer critical... read more