Space News & Blog Articles

On March 25, 2022, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft closed in on the Sun, getting ready to study it during a flyby. Its Metis coronagraph instrument, which blocks out the Sun so the spacecraft can study its outer atmosphere, recorded an image of something strange: a distorted, S-shaped “kink” in a small area of plasma flowing from the Sun. It was a magnetic solar switchback.

These switchbacks aren’t unknown. Other spacecraft, including the Helios 1 and 2 missions in the 1970s, plus the Ulysses spacecraft in the 1990s, spotted these strange events, too. But people weren’t quite sure what was causing these curious kinked switchbacks. This observation changed that. Now, thanks to the Solar Orbiter images, scientists have a better idea of what causes a switchback. The data from Metis and the spacecraft’s ultraviolet instrument might also help solar physicists understand how these events affect the solar wind.

The Sun as seen by the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft on 25 March 2022, one day before its closest approach of about 0.32 AU. The central image was taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument. The outer image was taken by the coronagraph Metis, an instrument that blocks out the bright light of the Sun’s surface in order to see the Sun’s faint outer atmosphere. The Metis image has been processed to bring out structures in the corona. The switchback is the prominent white/light blue feature at the roughly 8 o’clock position in the lower left. It appears to trace back to the active region on the surface of the Sun. Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI & Metis Teams and D. Telloni et al. (2022)

Our Magnetic Star

The Sun is an active cauldron of boiling plasma. Magnetic field lines flow in and out of active regions on the surface, contributing to its activity. Close to the Sun, and especially above the active regions, the lines can be open and closed. The closed ones are loops of magnetism that arch up into the solar atmosphere. Plasma flows along those field lines. Eventually, they curve around and disappear back into the Sun. The closed lines allow very little (if any) plasma to escape into space. The speed of the solar wind tends to be slow above those regions. On the other hand, open field lines are the reverse. They flow out from an active region and connect with the interplanetary magnetic field. Essentially, they become magnetic highways sending plasma out to space and spurring a fast solar wind.

The Metis-enabled Solar Orbiter images and data, coupled with some computer modeling of magnetic field regions on the Sun, show that switchbacks occur when open field links interact with nearby closed field lines. All the lines crowd together and eventually reconnect into stable configurations. That action releases energy and creates an S-shaped disturbance that travels out to space.

On September 12, Blue Origin New Shepard mission, NS-23, failed just over one minute into an uncrewed flight, forcing the escape system to eject its New Shepard upper stage capsule, which landed safely near the launch site. Several science experiments were being carried onboard with the original flight plan calling for the capsule to reach an altitude of a little more than 60 miles, which is internationally acknowledged as the edge of space. While the flight was uncrewed and the capsule made a successful soft landing after ejecting, the scenario could have been far more ill-favored if the flight had been crewed with tourists.

“During today’s flight, the capsule escape system successfully separated the capsule from the booster,” Blue Origin announced on their Twitter page on Sept 12. “The booster impacted the ground. There are no reported injuries; all personnel have been accounted for.”

Later that day, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced New Shepard was grounded pending an investigation into the cause of the failure.

The FAA released a statement saying, “Before the New Shepard vehicle can return to flight, the FAA will determine whether any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap affected public safety. This is standard practice for all mishap investigations.”

Before this failure, Blue Origin had an astounding 22 straight successful missions, which includes three successful escape system tests. Six of these missions were crewed flights, which included celebrities such as Blue Origin Founder Jeff Bezos and aviator Wally Funk on the first crewed flight, and Star Trek star William Shatner on the second crewed flight.

In 1916, Karl Schwarzchild theorized the existence of black holes as a resolution to Einstein’s field equations for his Theory of General Relativity. By the mid-20th century, astronomers began detecting black holes for the first time using indirect methods, which consisted of observing their effects on surrounding objects and space. Since the 1980s, scientists have studied supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which reside at the center of most massive galaxies in the Universe. And by April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first image ever taken of an SMBH.

These observations are an opportunity to test the laws of physics under the most extreme conditions and offer insights into the forces that shaped the Universe. According to a recent study, an international research team relied on data from the ESA’s Gaia Observatory to observe a Sun-like star with strange orbital characteristics. Due to the nature of its orbit, the team concluded that it must be part of a black hole binary system. This makes it the nearest black hole to our Solar System and implies the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in our galaxy.

The research was led by Kareem El-Badry, a Harvard Society Fellow astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). He was joined by researchers from CfA, MPIA, Caltech, UC Berkely, the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Observatoire de Paris, MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and multiple universities. The paper that describes their findings will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As El-Badry explained to Universe Today via email, these observations were part of a wider campaign to identify dormant black hole companions to normal stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. “I’ve been searching for dormant black holes for the last four years using a wide range of datasets and methods,” he said. “My previous attempts turned up a diverse menagerie of binaries that masquerade as black holes, but this was the first time the search has borne fruit.”

For the sake of this study, El-Badry and his colleagues relied on data obtained by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia Observatory. This mission has spent nearly a decade measuring the positions, distances, and proper motions of nearly 1 billion astronomical objects, such as stars, planets, comets, asteroids, and galaxies. By tracking the movement of objects as they orbit the center of the Milky Way (a technique known as astrometry), the Gaia mission aims to construct the most accurate 3D space catalog ever created.