Data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory offer clues about sun’s coronal irradiance

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
http://ift.tt/1WIzElD

Credit: NASA

Extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV) is perhaps an aspect of solar activity that gets less attention than it should. The authors make the interesting point in their introduction to the research article that ‘Although the total solar irradiance at Earth varies very little, the relative variance in the EUV is as large as the mean irradiance. This EUV light interacts with Earth’s thermosphere and stratosphere and may affect climate in a “top-down” process in regions such as northern Europe’.

A pair of researchers with Aberystwyth University in the U.K. has used data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to learn more about how the sun’s corona behaves over differing stages of its 11-year cycle, reports Bob Yirka at phys.org.

In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, Huw Morgan and Youra Taroyan describe attributes of the sun they observed over time and what they discovered about the “quiet corona” and its possible impact on us back here on Earth.

As the researchers note, most research to date regarding the sun’s corona has covered relatively small datasets, which provides only a limited view of what happens with the sun over longer periods of time—specifically, over the course of an entire coronal cycle.

But now, thanks to NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, the pair were able to look at data that covered the time between 2010 and 2017, which covers a large portion of one cycle.

Scientists have known for some time that the corona experiences solar cycles of approximately 11 years—solar flare activity grows and ebbs over the course of a single cycle. But until now, there has been no way to measure what happens over the course of a single cycle to explain the changes that occur.

Continued here.
– – –
Research article: Global conditions in the solar corona from 2010 to 2017
Authors: Huw Morgan and Youra Taroyan
Science Advances 14 Jul 2017