MPS: Blast Waves in the Sun's Atmosphere

[bystander]

Blast Waves in the Sun's Atmosphere
Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research | 2015 Oct 13

[c][attachment=0]standard_sans_both.jpg[/attachment][/c][hr][/hr]

Two teams of researchers led by Nariaki Nitta from the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in the USA and by Radoslav Bucík from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany have independently discovered a new solar phenomenon: large-scale waves in the star’s atmosphere accompanied by energetic particle emissions rich in helium-3. Helium-3 is a light variety of the inert gas helium. The huge waves may contribute significantly to accelerate the particles into space, the MPS scientists now report in The Astrophysical Journal. Decisive for this discovery were the two spacecraft STEREO A and ACE making it possible to simultaneously observe the Sun from two different directions. In the near future, no such opportunity will arise again.

The Sun is a highly eruptive star: Again and again it emits energetic particles and radiation into space in violent outbursts. Examples of outbursts are the coronal mass ejections (CMEs) where a plasma of electrons, protons, and a few heavy atoms is hurled into space, as well as short, collimated X-ray flares. Both phenomena occur in connection with so-called solar eruptions. Two research groups have now independently discovered a completely new type of solar ejection in observational data: large wave fronts in the Sun's atmosphere together with particle flows rich in helium-3. The waves could be tracked down by looking at the Sun’s atmosphere in extreme ultraviolet light. ...

Observations of EUV Waves in ³He-Rich Solar Energetic Particle Events - R. Bučík et al

• Astrophysical Journal 812(1):53 (2015 Oct 10) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/812/1/53

[neufer]

[b][color=#0000FF]The pp III chain is not a major source of energy in the Sun ([/color][color=#FF0000]only 0.11%[/color][color=#0000FF]), but was [u]VERY[/u] important in solar neutrino [u][/color][color=#FF00FF]DETECTION[/color][color=#0000FF][/u] because it generates [img]https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/0/6/6/06635770eb62e658d22cd34609c66b2c.png[/img] [u][/color]VERY[color=#FF0000][/u] high energy neutrinos (up to 14.06 MeV).[/color][/b]

---

---

<<The proton–proton chain reaction dominates in [the cores of] stars the size of the Sun or smaller.

In [the core of] the Sun, the helium-3 produced in these reactions exists for only about 400 years before it is converted into helium-4.>>

[Beyond]

In [the core of] the Sun, the helium-3 produced in these reactions exists for only about 400 years before it is converted into helium-4.>>

Now just how would anyone be able to know that??

[neufer]

In [the core of] the Sun, the helium-3 produced in these reactions
exists for only about 400 years before it is converted into helium-4.>>

Now just how would anyone be able to know that??

• It sometimes just takes a lot of chutzpah:

<<John Norris Bahcall (December 30, 1934 – August 17, 2005) was born in a Jewish family in Shreveport, Louisiana, and would later describe an early aspiration to become a Reform rabbi. He did not take science classes at high school. He was high school state tennis champion and a national debate champion. Bahcall began his university studies at Louisiana State University as a philosophy student on a tennis scholarship, where he considered pursuing the rabbinate. He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, still studying philosophy. He took his first physics class as a graduation requirement. He graduated with an A.B. in Physics from Berkeley in 1956, obtained his M.S. in physics in 1957 from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1961. He became a research fellow in physics at Indiana University in 1960 and worked at the California Institute of Technology from 1962 to 1970, where he worked alongside Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and William Fowler.

Bahcall is most notable and most renowned for his work in establishing the Standard Solar Model. He spent much of his life pursuing the solar neutrino problem with physical chemist Raymond Davis, Jr. Together, Davis and Bahcall collaborated on the Homestake Experiment, creating an underground detector for neutrinos in a South Dakota gold mine — essentially a very large tank filled with cleaning fluid. The flux of neutrinos found by the detector was 1/3 the amount theoretically predicted by Bahcall, a discrepancy that took over 30 years to resolve. The 2002 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba for their pioneering work in observing the neutrinos predicted from Bahcall's solar model, thereby vindicating Bahcall's prediction.

Bahcall's other contribution of great significance to astrophysics was the development and implementation of the Hubble Telescope, in collaboration with Lyman Spitzer, Jr., from the 1970s through to the period after the telescope was launched in 1990. The standard model of a galaxy, with a massive black hole surrounded by stars, is known as the Bahcall-Wolf model. The Bahcall-Soneira model was for many years the standard model for the structure of the Milky Way. He also contributed to accurate astrophysical models of stellar interiors. Bahcall published over 600 scientific papers and five books in the field of astrophysics.>>

[img3="When John Bahcall's theory about solar neutrinos was finally vindicated
after nearly 40 years, he said, "I feel like dancing I'm so happy."
Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation"]http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/assets/ ... -large.jpg[/img3]

John Bahcall: <<Well, right from the beginning it was apparent that Ray [Davis] was measuring fewer neutrinos events than I had predicted. He came to Caltech in early 1968 to spend a week with me while he and I wrote our papers up describing for me a refined calculation, for him the first measurement of the rate in his tank. It was clear that the rate that he was getting was a factor of three smaller than I was predicting, and that was a very serious problem.

There was a famous meeting at Caltech, just a few physicists—Dick Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Willie Fowler, Bob Christie, and a couple of others—in a small meeting room, where Ray presented his results and I presented my calculations of what he should have measured. There was some discussion of it afterwards, and it was pretty inconclusive. There was a discrepancy; it looked like one of us was wrong.

I was very visibly depressed, I guess, and Dick Feynman asked me after the meeting if I would like to go for a walk. We just went for a walk, and he talked to me about inconsequential things, personal things, which was very unusual for him, to spend his time in quite idle conversation; it never happened to me in the many years that I knew him that he did that before or afterwards. And only toward the end of the walk, which lasted over an hour, he told me, "Look, I saw that after this talk you were depressed, and I just wanted to tell you that I don't think you have any reason to be depressed. We've heard what you did, and nobody's found anything wrong with your calculations. I don't know why Davis's result doesn't agree with your calculations, but you shouldn't be discouraged, because maybe you've done something important, we don't know. I don't know what the explanation is, but you shouldn't feel discouraged."

For me I think of all of the walks or conversations I have had in my professional life, that was the most important, because I was a young man without tenure, and [while] I'd done many calculations by that time, this was the one that was most visible and people had paid the most attention to, and it looked like it was wrong. I really was feeling very, very, very discouraged. And for a person whom I so enormously admired, Dick Feynman, to tell me "You haven't done anything that's visibly wrong, maybe you've done something important"—for me that was a huge boost.>>

[Beyond]

It sometimes just takes a lot of chutzpah

Ah, ok. It's a Jewish scientist leap of faith thing, about the 400 years, then.

[neufer]

Shape-shifting neutrinos earn physicists the 2015 Nobel

http://tinyurl.com/q89ls76

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php? ... 45#p247592

[Beyond]

In [the core of] the Sun, the helium-3 produced in these reactions exists for only about 400 years before it is converted into helium-4.>>

Now just how would anyone be able to know that??

Well, after looking up Helium-3 stuff, it would seem that depending on what is involved in making it (there are many ways) it lasts from barely a few seconds, to billions of years. So apparently, some bright person has figured out that the way our sun makes it, it lasts about 400 years before it can be interacted upon and be converted to Helium-4.