While the team's results were based on a simulation, NASA's Parker Solar Probe could help further validate the research, Comisso said. But proving this hypothesis has been challenging. Fermi's work led physicists to suggest that the sun's plasma could be behind many of these particles, with others pelted at Earth from deep space. The research helps solve a question pondered by scientists since 1949, when Enrico Fermi first began to investigate magnetic fields in space as the source of high-energy particles observed bombarding Earth's atmosphere. The simulations demonstrated that magnetic fields in the corona can accelerate electrons and ions to nearly the speed of light, launching them into space. This created a good proxy for the corona granting the most exhaustive data yet on when and how high-energy particles form in the region. This has been difficult to study, however, because plasma moves erratically and unpredictably, so it's been a mystery as to how and when high-energy particles are generated.Ĭomisso and Lorenzo Sironi, also of Columbia, developed simulations using supercomputers at NASA, Columbia and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center that modeled the exact movement of electrons and ions in the solar plasma. Solar scientists believe high-energy particles are generated in this highly turbulent sea of stripped atoms (ions) and electrons. The sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is made up of plasma, meaning the violent conditions have stripped atoms of their electrons.
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