THE FIRST DETECTION OF ELECTRICALLY NEUTRAL ATOMS IN THE SOLAR WIND

This image is a picture of the electrically neutral atoms in the solar wind as detected by NASA's IMAGE spacecraft on 08 June 2000. Two pictures are shown, one made between 8:14 and 9:14 A.M. EST, and one taken between 9:15 and 10:15 A.M. EST. The spacecraft is spinning, for a 360 degree perspective of the sky (vertical axis), and the Low Energy Neutral Atom imager (LENA) instrument can view a slice of the sky about 90 degrees wide (horizontal axis). The innermost white circle at the bottom center of each photo represents the Earth to scale, and the surrounding traces represent the Earth's magnetic field lines at four local times. The false colors represent the intensity of neutral atoms entering the LENA instrument, with red as the highest intensity and blue the lowest. Note that in both images, there is a bright, colorful patch in the top center. This corresponds to the Sun's direction, so the burst of neutral atoms here is the neutral atoms streaming from the Sun in the solar wind. The right image was taken as a coronal mass ejection rammed into the Earth's magnetic field, and the amount of neutral atoms detected increased correspondingly.

IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

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