Astronomers were astonished. They had never heard such a signal from the sun before

It turns out there may be something to this crazy assumption. A team of scientists monitoring the Sun has just announced that they have discovered a source of long-lasting radio signals on the Sun that are very similar to signals associated with aurora borealis on Earth's surface.

However, this does not change the fact that such signals have never been observed on the Sun before. On the planets? naturally. On other stars? naturally. In the sun? until now no.

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But now everything has changed. The source of the signal was located at an altitude of 40,000 kilometers above the sunspot, a part of the sun's surface that is cooler – and therefore darker – than its surrounding areas. Never before have astronomers observed radio emissions from sunspots.

Monitoring results Published in the journal Nature astronomy Therefore, it provides us with completely new information about our star. On the other hand, knowing the Sun helps us understand other stars many light-years away. It therefore appears that radio emissions from sunspots will greatly enrich the current body of astrophysical knowledge.

It is worth noting here that radio bursts are commonly observed on the Sun. However, each of them lasts for a maximum of several hours. However, the radio signal persisted over the sunspots for more than a week. Most importantly, the recorded radio signal differs from others not only in terms of duration, but also in terms of spectrum and polarization. Similar signals had previously been observed only…near the Earth's poles.

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The discoverers of this mysterious process suggest that the radio burst above the sunspot arises in almost the same way as the aurora borealis on Earth. Electrons are captured and accelerated by magnetic field lines above the surface of the sunspot. The only difference is that the sunspot's magnetic field is thousands of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, so the resulting signal has a completely different frequency.

Scientists point out that when similar signals were detected from low-mass stars previously, it was assumed that they came from auroras at their poles. However, the detection of such a signal on a sunspot far from either pole of the Sun allows us to suspect, at least in some cases, that the emission from young stars came from large star spots on their surface, and not necessarily from the North Pole. Regions. This is a fundamental change and very valuable new information that should be included in simulations and models of stellar activity. In the coming years, similar signals on our star will be searched for by space probes such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been monitoring active regions on the Sun's surface for years. Given that the Sun is currently at the beginning of the period of maximum solar activity, it can be assumed that many sunspots moving on the surface will also emit similar radio signals.