'Rosetta Stone Eruption': NASA investigates dramatic event that can explain sun explosions

In a breakthrough never-before-seen observation, a team at NASA has discovered a rare, dramatic, and multi-staged eruption that the space agency is calling a ‘Solar Rosetta Stone’ that could help the scientific fraternity to finally unveil mysteries about the sun’s explosive outbursts. The discovery of this fundamental physics could solve the puzzle about what causes the solar flares and eruptions at the center of the solar system’s hottest body, which causes the dangerous space weather conditions with respect to the Earth.

For the first time ever, scientists at NASA were able to classify component of the solar explosions that consists of three different types of eruptions that wrap into one single event. The eruption phenomenon, now being called solar Rosetta Stone, is helping the scientists at NASA to translate what they already know about each type of solar eruption, and is also assisting in understanding the other types. The space agency has technically uncovered a storage “underlying mechanism” that could explain all types of solar eruptions that occur. 

“This event is a missing link, where we can see all of these aspects of different types of eruptions in one neat little package,” Emily Mason, lead author on the new study and solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said in a news release.

“It drives home the point that these eruptions are caused by the same mechanism, just at different scales,’ she continued. 

The multi-staged eruptions of the sun were captured by NASA’s new Sun-watching spacecraft known as the SoloHI instrument — short for Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager. The European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar Orbiter had caught sight of the first solar eruption that caused coronal mass ejection, or CME.  SoloHI had recorded NASA’s first-ever solar eruption using one of its four detectors at less than 15 percent of its normal cadence, accidentally. The eruption, in actuality, was first observed with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the European Space Agency, and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory on March 12 and 13, 2016. 

Scientists saw the ejection of a hot layer of solar material above a magnetically active region on the Sun’s surface. Within half an hour, a second cooler layer of material also ejected from the same spot, confusing scientists as it was too huge to be a jet, and too small to be a CME which is the release of large clouds consisting of high-energy charged particles and magnetic fields.

Finding important to understand 'space weather'

"Eruptions on the Sun usually come in one of three forms: a coronal mass ejection, a jet, or a partial eruption. Coronal mass ejections – CMEs and jets are both explosive eruptions that cast energy and particles into space, but they look very different,” explains NASA. Jets are narrow eruptions of columns of solar material, while the CMEs are the huge bubbles that expand out influenced by the sun’s powerful magnetic fields. 

[The first coronal mass ejection, or CME, observed by the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) Credit: NASA]

According to NASA, the finding is integral in the understanding of the solar explosions including the CMEs and the jets as the large eruption might cause disruptions at Earth. These explosions from the sun can result in space weather – a storm of high-energy particles that can be dangerous for the astronauts and technology installed in space and, in extreme cases, utility grids on Earth.