An Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) team along with their international collaborators have developed a new model of the internal thermal evolution of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), as they travel from the sun toward the earth.
This has helped divulge the heat budget of the CMEs and their transactions during the dynamic evolution of CMEs. “The study can help trace the thermal histories of solar CMEs and predict the impact of space weather on planets in our solar system,” states the Department of Science and Technology.
CMEs are massive eruptions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun’s outer atmosphere. “If CMEs are earth-directed, they can adversely affect our planet’s space weather and space-based infrastructure. How hot a CME starts from the sun and how it cools down while reaching earth is yet to be understood,” the department said.
