India’s Aditya-L1 Joins Global Effort in Landmark Solar Storm Study
Home /India’s Aditya-L1 Joins Global Effort in Landmark Solar Storm Study

December 09, 2025

In May 2024, our planet faced the strongest solar storm in more than two decades, which disturbed Earth’s environment severely – an event now called “Gannon’s storm”. The solar storm is composed of a series of giant explosions on the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). A CME is like a massive bubble of hot gas and magnetic energy thrown out from the Sun into space. When these bubbles hit Earth, they can shake our planet’s magnetic shield and cause serious trouble for satellites, communication systems, GPS, and even power grids.

A team of Indian scientists has published a breakthrough study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters(DOI:10.3847/2041-8213/adfe60, September 2025) that possibly explains why this storm behaved so unusually.

India’s Aditya-L1 Joins Global Effort in Landmark Solar Storm Study

Figure: Artistic illustration of the ejection of hot gas bubbles and magnetic field from the Sun, known as Coronal Mass Ejections. These two back-to-back CMEs collided in interplanetary space, and the embedded magnetic field lines snapped and rejoined, as captured by Aditya-L1 and six other spacecraft from NASA and NOAA, as shown in the above figure. The figure and spacecraft positions are not drawn to scale and are for illustrative purposes only.

During the May 2024 solar storm, scientists discovered something unusual: the Sun’s magnetic fields, which are like twisted ropes inside a solar storm, were breaking and rejoining within the storm. Usually, a CME carries a twisted “magnetic rope” that interacts with Earth’s magnetic shield as it approaches Earth. But this time, two CMEs collided in space and squeezed each other so firmly that the magnetic field lines inside one of them snapped and rejoined in new ways, a process called magnetic reconnection. This sudden reversal of the magnetic field made the storm's impact much stronger than expected. Satellites also detected particles suddenly speeding up, indicating an increase in their energy, confirming the magnetic reconnection event.

At the heart of this discovery is India’s first solar observatory, Aditya-L1, which joined forces with six U.S. satellites (NASA’s Wind, ACE, THEMIS-C, STEREO-A, MMS, and NASA-NOAA joint mission DSCOVR). For the first time, researchers could study the same extreme solar storm from multiple vantage points in space. Thanks to precise magnetic field measurements from India’s Aditya-L1 mission, scientists were able to map this reconnection region. They found that the area where the CME’s magnetic field was tearing and reconnecting was enormous – about 1.3 million kilometers across, i.e, nearly 100 times the size of Earth. It was the first time such a giant magnetic breakup and rejoining had ever been seen inside a CME.

This discovery matters because it enhances our understanding of how solar storms evolve as they travel from the Sun to Earth. This demonstrates India’s growing leadership in global space science. With Aditya-L1’s contributions, India is now better prepared to understand and predict powerful solar storms.

Reference:

Shibotosh Biswas, AnkushBhaskar, Anil Raghav, Ajay Kumar, KalpeshGhag, Smitha V. Thampi, and Vipin K. Yadav. "Pinching of ICME Flux Rope: Unprecedented Multipoint Observations of Internal Magnetic Reconnection during Gannon's Superstorm." DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/adfe60, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, (2025).