Solar Probe Aditya-L1: Explosive Debut in Space

When the Sun hurled enormous amounts of radiation into space in an explosive eruption on February 22 of last year, the Indian space probe Aditya-L1, launched a few months earlier, was watching closely – and thus captured the first images of such a flare in the lowermost solar atmosphere. Today, a team of researchers led by the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (India) presents the analysis of the observational data in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany is also involved in the publication. The observed category X6.3 flare was one of the most powerful of the past year; a few months later, similarly strong flares were accompanied by spectacular auroras visible even in southern Europe. The new observations help to understand how flares originate and propagate in the different layers of the solar atmosphere.