A team of current and former OSU researchers and students are studying the sun's emission of gamma rays and how they relate to other outbursts and the solar cycle by analyzing data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The collaboration includes current OSU researchers  Tim Linden, Bei Zhoug, John Beacom and Annika Peter as well as OSU alumni Kenny C. Y. Ng, and Qing-Wen Tang. Their work and interesting discoveries are the subject of a recent publication in Scientific American.

Photo credits: The sun belches out a powerful solar flare and coronal mass ejection (CME) in this image taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on September 6, 2017. New analysis of data from NASA’s Fermi space telescope suggests that the sun’s emission of gamma rays—the most energetic electromagnetic radiation in the universe—may be linked with CMEs and other outbursts, which follow a roughly 11-year cycle of activity. Credit: NASA, SDO