NASA recently concluded a 5-year study on this issue

Aug 17, 2012 13:56 GMT  ·  By

Most people know that the Sun is responsible for producing light and heat. Some know that it also produces something called the solar winds. But very few people know that our parent star also produces jets of high-energy electrons called electron strahl.

The latter was the target of a newly-released, 5-year study conducted by the NASA Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft. The satellite was launched to space aboard a Delta II rocket, on August 25, 1997, from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Florida.

The purpose of studying electron strahl was to gain a deeper understanding of the factors controlling space weather. This is the generic name given to the conditions present in the space surrounding Earth, which dictate how the Sun influences our planet.

On Earth, the climate can be influenced by major factors, such as the Gulf Stream, or smaller ones, like a localized weather pattern. Similarly, space weather can be influenced by solar winds and coronal mass ejections (CME), as well as by the electron strahl.

Comparatively, very little is known about the latter. The purpose of the new investigation was to rectify this oversight. “People think of the Sun as giving out light and heat. But it is also always losing particles, losing mass,” expert Ruth Skoug says.

She holds an appointment as a space scientist at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Skoug and her team led the research.

“Wherever we look, the electron strahl is much wider than we would have expected. So there must be some process that helps scatter the electrons into a wider beam,” adds ACE deputy project scientist Eric Christian, who is based at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in Greenbelt, Maryland.

In theory, as the magnetic field lines emanating from the Sun move away from the Sun, they should narrow down the width of the electron strahl, essentially focusing it. Results from the ACE show that this does not happen in real life.

“We don't yet know how the electrons get scattered into these different widths. The electrons are so spread out that they rarely bump into each other to get pushed off course, so instead we think that electromagnetic waves add energy, and therefore speed, to the particles,” Skoug comments.

These results will undoubtedly raise numerous eyebrows in the international astrophysical community, so we can expect to see other studies being conducted on the electron strahl in the years to come.