New Delhi, Nov 3 — India's first space-based solar observatory, Aditya-L1, has helped scientists uncover new details about the behaviour of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) beneficial for space-weather studies and thereby affecting satellites and communication networks, an official statement said on Tuesday.
The statement from the Ministry of Science & Technology said observations revealed for the first time that these massive solar eruptions do not expand uniformly as previously assumed.
These differences in CME expansion can affect its speed as it travels towards Earth causing space-weather disturbances.
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) combined observations from the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) aboard Aditya-L1 with data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and three-dimensional modelling to reconstruct the full 3-D geometry and dynamics of a CME.
“The asymmetric shape of an early CME can have important implications for how it interacts with the solar wind and experiences drag during its propagation through the heliosphere. Such effects can influence the CME’s speed and, ultimately, its arrival time at Earth”, said Jayant Joshi of IIA and a co-author of the study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Aditya L 1 satellite launched in September 2023 is now operational at the Sun–Earth L1 point, providing continuous observations of the Sun. It carries 7 payloads, of which the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), the primary payload, is an internally occulted coronagraph designed to observe the solar corona simultaneously in various modes.
The model was used to test how the CME’s orientation and uneven sideways expansion could produce the spectral structures observed by VELC.
The researchers plan to use this technique on other CMEs, to reconstruct their motion without relying entirely on multi-viewpoint imaging from telescopes in space. This complementarity is particularly valuable in the lower corona, where CMEs evolve rapidly, and their motion along the line of sight cannot be obtained from imaging alone, the statement noted.