Dark Fireworks on the Sun

On June 7, 2011, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a flash of X-rays coming from the western edge of the solar disk. Registering only "M" (for medium) on the Richter scale of solar flares, the blast at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill eruption--that is, until researchers looked at the movies.

"We'd never seen anything like it," says Alex Young, a solar physicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Half of the sun appeared to be blowing itself to bits."

"In terms of raw power, this really was just a medium-sized eruption," says Young, "but it had a uniquely dramatic appearance caused by all the inky-dark material. We don't usually see that."

Solar physicist Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC calls it a case of "dark fireworks."

"The blast was triggered by an unstable magnetic filament near the sun's surface," he explains. "That filament was loaded down with cool plasma, which exploded in a spray of dark blobs and streamers. "Cool" has a special meaning on the sun: The plasma blobs registered a temperature of 20,000 Kelvin or less. That is relatively cool. Most of the surrounding gas had temperatures between 40,000 K and 1,000,000 K.
The plasma blobs were as big as planets, many larger than Earth. They rose and fell ballistically, moving under the influence of the sun's gravity like balls tossed in the air, exploding "like bombs" when they hit the stellar surface.

Some blobs, however, were more like guided missiles. "In the movies we can see material 'grabbed' by magnetic fields and funneled toward sunspot groups hundreds of thousands of kilometers away," notes Young.

SDO also detected a shadowy shock wave issuing from the blast site. The 'solar tsunami' propagated more than halfway across the sun, visibly shaking filaments and loops of magnetism en route. [91 MB Quicktime] Long-range action has become a key theme of solar physics since SDO was launched in 2010. The observatory frequently sees explosions in one part of the sun affecting other parts. Sometimes one explosion will trigger another ... and another ... with a domino sequence of flares going off all around the star.

It's tempting to look at the movies and conclude that most of the exploded material fell back--but that wouldn't be true, according to Vourlidas. "The blast also propelled a significant coronal mass ejection (CME) out of the sun's atmosphere."

He estimates that the cloud massed about 4.5 x1015 grams, placing it in the top 5% of all CMEs recorded in the Space Age. For comparison, the most massive CME ever recorded was 1016 grams, only a factor of ~2 greater than the June 7th cloud. The amount of material that fell back to the sun on June 7 was approximately equal to the amount that flew away, Vourlidas says.

As remarkable as the June 7th eruption seems to be, Young says it might not be so rare. "In fact," he says, "it might be downright common."

Before SDO, space-based observatories observed the sun with relatively slow cadences and/or limited fields of view. They could have easily missed the majesty of such an explosion, catching only a single off-center snapshot at the beginning or end of the blast to hint at what actually happened.

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NASA Dryden Flies New Supersonic Shockwave Probes

NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center is flight testing two new supersonic shockwave probes to determine their viability as research tools.

The probes were designed by Eagle Aeronautics of Hampton, Va., under a NASA Research Announcement, and manufactured by Triumph Aerospace Systems of Newport News, Va. The probes were first tested in a wind tunnel at NASA's Langley Research Center, also in Hampton.

The new probes are being flown on NASA Dryden's F-15B research test bed aircraft.

Supersonic flight over land is severely restricted in the United States and elsewhere because the sonic booms created by the shock waves propagating from supersonic aircraft are an annoyance to many and can damage private property.

Sonic boom researchers hope the Eagle Aero probes will aid their understanding of supersonic shockwaves. The ultimate goal of NASA's sonic boom research is to find ways to control the shockwaves and lessen the noise, so that it may be possible for supersonic flight to become more routine.

"Using these probes can be a real benefit in understanding and modeling the generation of shock waves and their associated sonic booms," said Dryden research engineer Dan Banks. "They could allow us to accurately define the near-instantaneous flight conditions of the aircraft being probed, while defining that airplane's flow field. At the same time, the probes provide flight condition data on the host aircraft," Banks said.

The primary objective of the flight series is to determine the feasibility of using the Eagle probes for air-to-air shockwave probing. Additional objectives include determining the durability and robustness of the probes in flight, their sensitivity to flight conditions, and the accuracy of the software.

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'Odd Couple' Binary Makes Dual Gamma-ray Flares

In December 2010, a pair of mismatched stars in the southern constellation Crux whisked past each other at a distance closer than Venus orbits the sun. The system possesses a so-far unique blend of a hot and massive star with a compact fast-spinning pulsar. The pair's closest encounters occur every 3.4 years and each is marked by a sharp increase in gamma rays, the most extreme form of light.

The unique combination of stars, the long wait between close approaches, and periods of intense gamma-ray emission make this system irresistible to astrophysicists. Now, a team using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe the 2010 encounter reports that the system displayed fascinating and unanticipated activity.
"Even though we were waiting for this event, it still surprised us," said Aous Abdo, a Research Assistant Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a leader of the research team.

Few pairings in astronomy are as peculiar as high-mass binaries, where a hot blue-white star many times the sun's mass and temperature is joined by a compact companion no bigger than Earth -- and likely much smaller. Depending on the system, this companion may be a burned-out star known as a white dwarf, a city-sized remnant called a neutron star (also known as a pulsar) or, most exotically, a black hole.

Just four of these "odd couple" binaries were known to produce gamma rays, but in only one of them did astronomers know the nature of the compact object. That binary consists of a pulsar designated PSR B1259-63 and a 10th-magnitude Be-type star known as LS 2883. The pair lies 8,000 light-years away.

The pulsar is a fast-spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field. This combination powers a lighthouse-like beam of energy, which astronomers can easily locate if the beam happens to sweep toward Earth. The beam from PSR B1259-63 was discovered in 1989 by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The neutron star is about the size of Washington, D.C., weighs about twice the sun's mass, and spins almost 21 times a second.

The pulsar follows an eccentric and steeply inclined orbit around LS 2883, which weighs roughly 24 solar masses and spans about nine times its size. This hot blue star sits embedded in a disk of gas that flows out from its equatorial region.

At closest approach, the pulsar passes less than 63 million miles from its star -- so close that it skirts the gas disk around the star's middle. The pulsar punches through the disk on the inbound leg of its orbit. Then it swings around the star at closest approach and plunges through the disk again on the way out.

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