Jan. 13, 2012 Scientist's Solar "Surfer Waves" Make Big Splash
This news might cause surfers around the world to grab their boards: Catholic University physicist Leon Ofman has co-discovered waves the size of the United States. But these radical waves aren't rolling off the coast of Oahu or Tahiti - they're just off the surface of the sun.
Ofman, research professor at the University's Institute for Astrophysics and Computational Sciences, discovered the huge, so-called plasma "surfer waves" with NASA scientist Barbara Thompson, and they published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in June. The news continues to make a big splash; the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang just listed the discovery among its top eight weather and astronomy events of 2011 .
Ofman and Thompson discovered the waves using the Solar Dynamics Observatory's space-based Atmospheric Imaging Assembly telescope that NASA launched two years ago to study the sun. Ofman and Thompson found that during an eruption of plasma material from the sun's million-degree atmosphere or corona - known as a coronal mass ejection - there are strong flows in the corona that cause a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (named for the pair who discovered the phenomenon in fluids on Earth).
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The instability manifests itself when materials of differing speeds and densities - like clouds and the jet stream above them - meet. In the ocean, it happens when wind hits water, curling it into waves suitable for surfing.
Although the instability is well known and seen on Earth and other planets, Ofman and Thompson's discovery was the first time that the instability and those familiar curved swells were seen in the plasma of the sun's super-heated atmosphere.
"Knowing more about this instability can help scientists better understand the nature of the solar corona, the energy release, and heating process that take place on the sun," says Ofman.
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