Understanding our world requires us to understand the effects of minor changes to our atmosphere that are caused by pollution, volcanoes, and outgassing cows. (Since the cows are natural, we’re not going to call that pollution, although opinions may vary.) We also have to look at the Sun and its behaviors. 

From 1645 to 1715, for instance, the Sun went through a weird low period with very few sunspots and none of its normal every 11-year maxima occurring. This period of solar minima, called the Maunder Minimum, coincided with drops in temperature on Earth that dramatically affected harvests. We still don’t know what happened, but the need to understand solar activity drives all sorts of research into the Sun’s magnetic fields. 

In a new study appearing in Nature Astronomy and led by Marco Stangalini, astronomers use high-resolution images of the solar atmosphere to study how magnetically driven waves called Alfven waves carry energy through the Sun’s atmosphere. Remarkably, they found that waves low down in the atmosphere are able to send energy up through a column of material, potentially even explaining why the Sun’s outermost layers are hotter than the lower layers. While these waves were predicted 50 years ago, it is only with today’s high-quality instruments and powerful computer models that we can finally study them in detail. As the still new Inouye Solar Telescope has more and more time to capture data, we can expect more breakthroughs.

More Information

Queen Mary, University of London press release

“Torsional oscillations within a magnetic pore in the solar photosphere,” Marco Stangalini et al., 2021 May 10, Nature Astronomy