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Coronal mass ejections (CME), commonly known as solar storms, are now in the news because they are entering a phase where their frequency is set to rise, peaking perhaps in 2025 — all of which could potentially affect satellites and even power grids.
(Recently, many satellites belonging to SpaceX founder-CEO Elon Musk were damaged by CMEs.)
Now, Indian researchers have developed a simple technique to separate the constant background of the sun’s corona to reveal the dynamic corona.
The simple approach of subtracting the constant background can help in better identification of CME events, where a large cloud of energetic and highly magnetised plasma erupts from the solar corona into space, causing radio and magnetic disturbances on earth. It can also make their study easier.
CMEs are dynamic structures in the solar corona and are capable of driving the weather in the near-Earth space, says a press release from the Department of Science and Technology. It becomes imperative to separate such structures and visually or automatically identify CMEs through the radial distances in the images taken using coronagraphs.
The density of the corona — the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere — decreases with distance radially outwards. As the intensity of the corona observed in white light depends on the density of particles in the atmosphere, it decreases exponentially. If the contrast between the constant corona and transient CMEs is not high, detection of CMEs becomes a challenge.
The ‘simple radial gradient filter’ (SiRGraF) — a new method developed by Ritesh Patel, Vaibhav Pant, and Dipankar Banerjee of the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, along with Satabdwa Majumdar from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru — is capable of separating the background to reveal the dynamic corona.
Representational image
Indigenous electrocatalyst
Scientists at the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials (ARCI) have developed a platinum-based electrocatalyst for use in fuel cells.
The indigenous electrocatalyst is as good as the imported ones in terms of performance in fuel cells, but is more durable and corrosion-resistant. At 20 per cent, it showed less than the acceptable limits of loss in the active surface area of a catalyst (40 per cent), says a press release from ARCI. This could enhance the lifetime of the fuel cell stack performance.
Las Engineers and Consultants Pvt Ltd (LECPL), a Mumbai-based company engaged in designing and building plants for the chemical, pharmaceutical, and allied industries, is in the process of acquiring ARCI know-how for manufacturing this electrocatalyst, the release says.
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