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The Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) on board the Aditya-L1 mission — India’s first dedicated solar space mission — has captured a solar flare ‘kernel’ in the lower solar atmosphere, namely the photosphere and the chromosphere, in the images recorded in the near-ultraviolet (NUV) band, researchers at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) said.
This ground-breaking observation marks a leap in the understanding of explosive activities in the solar atmosphere.
Aditya-L1 spacecraft, India’s first dedicated space mission for solar studies, was launched on September 2, 2023, and successfully injected into a halo orbit around the first Lagrange point L1. This location is 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth.
The SUIT instrument onboard Aditya-L1 observed an X6.3-class solar flare on February 22, 2024, one of the most intense categories of solar eruptions. The uniqueness of this discovery lies in the fact that SUIT detected brightening in the near ultraviolet wavelength range (200-400 nm).
“Why we are reporting a year later is because this instrument is new and data has to be thoroughly analysed and checked for any systematic effects,” Prof A N Ramaprakash, SUIT instrument principal investigator and Dean, Core Academic Programmes at IUCAA told The Indian Express.
Results are published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, one of the world’s leading astrophysics journals, on the occasion of National Science Day (Feb 28).
Ph.D. student Soumya Roy led this pioneering research under the guidance of Prof. Durgesh Tripathi and Prof. A. N. Ramaprakash at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, India. “With SUIT and other instruments now fully operational,Aditya-L1 is set to revolutionize our understanding of the Sun and its influence on space weather,” scientists said.
The research team includes other experts from IUCAA, Manipal Academy for Higher Education (MAHE), UR Rao Satellite Centre / ISRO, Centre for Excellence in Space Science India (IISER-Kolkata), Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Thiruvananthapuram and the SoLEXS team from UR Rao Satellite Centre / ISRO.
Solar flares release huge bursts of radiation and energetic particles by sudden release of magnetic energy stored in the complex solar magnetic field. Such events can have a serious impact on space weather and geo-space, including disrupting radio communications, affecting satellite operations, interfering with power grids, posing risks to astronauts and airline passengers.
The Sun’s full disk has never been imaged in this entire wavelength range in such detail. These observations provide new insights into these huge eruptions in the solar atmosphere and highlight the complex physical processes involved in the transfer of mass and energy through different layers of the solar atmosphere, IUCAA scientists said.
The SUIT instrument on board Aditya-L1 is, for the first time, providing these ever-missing observations, revealing never-before-seen insights into the complex dynamics of solar flares and the processes at play in the transfer of mass and energy across the different layers of the solar atmosphere.
The detection of localized brightening in the images recorded by SUIT that directly corresponds with the increase in temperature of the plasma in the solar corona at the top of the atmosphere is one of the most exciting revelations. This provides the direct link between the heating of the plasma and flare energy deposition.
