Earth’s sister planet Venus is experiencing extreme space weather this week after a giant unseen sunspot from Earth sent a massive burst of plasma toward the scorching hot planet.
Monday (5 September), NASA’s STEREO-A sun tracking spacecraft Coronal mass removal (CME) is a cloud of charged particles emanating from the earth’s upper layer. atmosphere of the suncorona emerges from behind Sun, SpaceWeather.com (opens in new tab) reported.
CME was second to hit Venus in a week; another exploded from the sun on Wednesday, August 30, and reached the planet three days later, just as the European Solar Orbiter spacecraft flew.
Related: Solar Orbiter to look at Venus’ magnetic field as it wobbles by the planet
Georgo Ho, a solar physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told SpaceWeather.com that the latest explosion was “no ordinary occurrence.”
“I can safely say that the September 5 event is one of the largest (if not the largest) Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) storms we’ve seen so far since Solar Orbiter launched in 2020.” The principal investigators of the Energetic Particle Detector Instrument on the Solar Orbiter said: SpaceWeather.com. “It’s at least an order of magnitude stronger than the radiation storm from last week’s CME.”
However, the team operating the magnetometer instrument aboard the spacecraft, tweeted out (opens in new tab) The CME “seems to have largely missed” the Solar Orbiter, despite being affected by the energetic particles delivered by the spacecraft.
“…there were a lot of energetic particles from this event and [the magnetometer] The magnetometer team had 19 ‘single-event upsets’ in memory yesterday,” the magnetometer team said in a tweet.[The Solar Orbiter magnetometer] is radiation resistant: automatically corrects data as designed and operated as rated.”
He added that the energy density of the charged particles around the spacecraft “has not decreased since the beginning of the storm.”
“This is indicative of a very fast and powerful interplanetary shock, and the inner heliosphere could be full of these high-energy particles for a long time. I think I’ve only seen a few of them in the last few solar cycles.” told him SpaceWeather.com (opens in new tab). (The heliosphere is a huge bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields blown around by the sun.)
The source of the powerful explosion is believed to be sunspot region AR3088, which crossed the Earth-facing side of the solar disk in August and turned into a much more powerful monster after disappearing from Earth’s view.
SpaceWeather.com said that due to the Sun’s rotation, the sunspot will face our planet again next week, which means Earth may be ready for some, too. space weather activity soon.
The Solar Orbiter was built to measure such events, so scientists can hardly complain about the impact. As Ho told SpaceWeather.com, “many science papers will examine this. [event] over the years.”
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