A spectacular solar eruption in 2011 is helping scientists discover how stars are born.
The sun emitted a huge cloud of superheated plasma called a coronal mass ejection. Some of the material from the explosion rained back down onto the sun, according to Space.com. Researchers believe this is an example of how newborn stars suck up plasma from their surroundings in a process called accretion.
"This opens the way to new studies that link the sun to young stars, by both solar and stellar physicists," said Fabio Reale, of the University of Palermo and the Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Italy, who led the study.
It's believed forming stars "siphon off material from a surrounding circumstellar disk." The 2011 solar explosion allowed researchers to watch how this process works first-hand.
The team compared ultra-violet (UV) and extreme-UV light images of the sun storm and compared them with hydrodynamic simulations. They determined the density (about 164 billion particles per cubic inch) and velocity (about 1 million miles per hour) of the materials that fell back onto the sun were similar to those seen during stellar accretion flows.
The impact of the material was spread over a large area of the sun's surface and generated "detectable high-energy emissions."
In most cases stellar accretion produces only very low levels of stellar-energy light. From this new research, the scientists believe the light is produced, but quickly gets absorbed into surrounding matter.
"The analysis of the high-energy light should be able to tell us about the composition of the disk material," Reale said in an e-mail to Space.com.
It may seem questionable to study newborn stars through solar activity, but Reale said this is extremely common in scientific research.
"Some physical processes are universal," he said. "If we can zoom in, and make the correct scaling and extrapolations, they can be investigated in different - even very different - systems. The sun has been used to study much brighter stellar coronae and flares, for instance. Probably, even people studying accretion in neutron stars or black holes may find this work interesting."
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