A new artificial intelligence model revealed the hidden turbulence in the atmosphere of the Sun. Here’s all about it.
The Sun and its atmosphere: Hidden turbulence revealed
A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics shows a multi-scale deep learning technology for estimating the horizontal velocity fields. The sun is essentially a hot ball of helium and hydrogen. The star was formed over 4.5 billion years ago. At this point in time, researchers estimate that it is halfway through its lifetime. Its temperature is around 10,00 degrees Fahrenheit.
“We developed a novel convolutional neural network to estimate the spatial distribution of horizontal velocity by using the spatial distributions of temperature and vertical velocity,” stated the research team. The study was led by Ryohtaroh Ishikawa. Ishikawa is an astronomer from Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory. “This led to efficient detection of spatially spread features and concentrated features. Our network exhibited a higher performance on almost all the spatial scales when compared to those reported in previous studies,” they added.
More about the new findings
According to studies, the electromagnetic activity associated with sunspots leads to solar flares. It can also cause coronal mass ejections and electromagnetic phenomena that can affect the Earth. Coronal mass ejections are humungous expulsions of magnetic fields and plasma from the outer region of the solar atmosphere. However, the electromagnetic phenomenon leads to satellite and communication disruptions. Additionally, they also endanger astronauts.
“By comparing the results of the three convection models, we observed that the rapid decrease in coherence spectrum occurred on the scales that were lower than the energy injection scales. Which were characterized by the peaks of the power spectra of the vertical velocities. This implies that the network was not appropriately trained to reproduce the velocity fields in small scales generated by turbulent cascades,” revealed the study. Additionally, researchers compared data from similar stars. And based on the historical records about the sun, they concluded that the sun has not been this active before.
