Solar plasma generated by sungrazing comets
Abstract
It is analytically shown that passages of comets near the Sun's surface with velocities more than 600 km/s is accompanied by aerodynamic crushing of their nuclei within the solar chromosphere and transversal expansion of the crushed matter. The deceleration of the flattened hypervelocity body within the solar photosphere has sharply impulsive and strongly explosive character. The specific energy release in the explosion zone near the solar surface 10-100 thousand times exceeds the evaporation heat of the nucleus material, so that the process is accompanied by generation of high-temperature plasma and non-stationary explosive phenomena around the photosphere. Spectral observations of these phenomena by SOHO and SDO type space observatories with high spatial and temporal resolutions are of interest for the plasma astrophysics as well as the physics of solar flares.
- Publication:
-
Advances in Plasma Astrophysics
- Pub Date:
- June 2011
- DOI:
- 10.1017/S1743921311006648
- Bibcode:
- 2011IAUS..274...92I
- Keywords:
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- Sun: general;
- sungrazing comets;
- solar impact plasma;
- solar photospheric flares