Earth’s sister planet Venus is experiencing a bout of extreme space weather this week after a giant sunspot, invisible from Earth, pushed a massive blast of plasma toward the scorching planet.
on Monday (September 5), NASA STEREO-A Spotted a spacecraft watching the sun a Coronal mass ejection (CME), a cloud of charged particles erupting from the upper layer of sun atmosphereAura, coming out from behind the sunAnd the SpaceWeather.com (Opens in a new tab) mentioned.
CME is the second to hit Venus In a week; Another exploded from the sun on Wednesday (August 30th) and reached the planet three days later, Just as the European Solar Orbiter spacecraft flew by.
Related: Solar probe to look at the magnetic field of Venus as it swings next to the planet
George Hu, a heliophysicist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, told SpaceWeather.com that the recent eruption was not an “ordinary event.”
“I can safely say that the Sept. 5 event is one of the largest (if not the largest) active solar particle (SEP) storms we’ve seen so far since the launch of the Solar Orbiter in 2020,” Hu, one of the leading detector investigators said. About energetic particles on board the solar module SpaceWeather.com. “It’s at least an order of magnitude stronger than the radiation storm from the CME last week.”
However, the team operating the magnetometer instrument on board the spacecraft chirp (Opens in a new tab) that the CME “appears to be largely missed” by the orbiting solar module, even though the spacecraft was affected by the energetic particles it transmits.
“There were… quite a large number of energetic particles from this event and [the magnetometer] “19 ‘single events’ experienced dysphoria” in their memory yesterday,” the magnetometer team said in a tweet.[The Solar Orbiter magnetometer] Robust for radiation: it corrects data automatically as it was designed and nominally running all the time.”
Hu added that the energetic density of charged particles around the spacecraft “has not subsided since the onset of the storm.”
“This is an indication of a very strong, fast interplanetary shock, and the inner heliosphere may have been full of these high-energy particles for a long time. I think I’ve only seen two of these in the last two solar cycles,” Hu said. SpaceWeather.com (Opens in a new tab). (The heliosphere is a huge bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that the Sun blows around itself.)
The source of the powerful volcanic eruption is believed to be sunspot region AR3088, which crossed the Earth-facing side of the Sun’s disk in August and has likely grown into a much more powerful monster since it disappeared from Earth’s view.
SpaceWeather.com said that due to the rotation of the Sun, sunspots will encounter our planet again next week, which means Earth may be available for some as well. space climate Activity soon.
The Solar Orbiter is built to measure such events, so scientists hardly ever complain about the beating. As Hu told SpaceWeather.com, “Many scientific papers will study this matter [event] for the coming years.”
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