India's Aditya-L1 solar probe watches powerful flare erupt from the sun

India's first sun-studying spacecraft, Aditya-L1, has captured one of our star's fiery outbursts in new detail.

From its vantage point about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, Aditya-L1 gets an uninterrupted view of our sun, allowing the probe to observe solar flares as they're unleashed, as well as other activities that can affect space weather.

Solar flares occur in regions where the sun's magnetic fields become tangled, appearing as sudden, bright bursts that can last from several minutes to hours. The suite of seven science instruments onboard Aditya-L1 work together to detect and analyze these flares across a range of wavelengths, providing scientists with a more complete picture of how the sun's energy propagates through different layers of the star.

Among these instruments is the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, or SUIT, which observed the flare on Feb. 22 of last year. The flare, classified as X6.3 — one of the strongest categories of solar eruptions — emerged from the active region NOAA 13590, which had appeared just days earlier on the sun's Earth-facing side.

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SUIT observed a brightening in the near-ultraviolet wavelength range of 200 to 400 nanometers, which had never been seen before as there were no dedicated space telescopes focused on this wavelength range, according to a Feb. 28 statement by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which operates Aditya-L1.

By combining data from the SUIT instrument with observations from the probe's onboard spectrometer SoLEXS (Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer), scientists concluded that the brightening in the sun's lower atmosphere due to the flare was directly linked to a rise in temperature in the outer corona.

This confirmed that the energy released by the solar flare propagated through the different layers of the sun's atmosphere, according to a paper describing the observations, which was published Feb. 28 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"It is a great stroke of luck that Aditya-L1 was able to witness such a strong flare right at the beginning of its research career," study co-author Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, said in another statement.

Two more spacecraft — NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter — as well as unspecified Earth-based telescopes also observed the event, according to the statement.

"Together with observations from other probes and telescopes, this for the first time provides a complete picture of the processes that occur in different layers of the solar atmosphere during a flare," Solanki said.