Streaming from The sun rushing at one million miles an hour, the solar wind – a pulsating plasma of electrons, protons and ions flowing through space – has been a mystery for many years. Scientists know that it once stripped Mars of its atmosphere, and a few imagine that it put ice on the moon. Today, it causes flickering aurora borealis and disrupts satellite communication systems. But scientists haven’t been capable of determine this How the solar wind arises, heats as much as tens of millions of degrees or accelerates to fill your entire solar system.
Now a team of scientists think they’ve figured it out: The solar wind, they are saying, is driven by jets – small, intermittent explosions at the bottom of the sun’s upper atmosphere, or corona. Theory that was just published IN Astrophysics Journal, emerged from data collected by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a car-sized satellite that has made multiple flybys of the sun since 2018. It measures the properties of the solar wind and tracks the flow of warmth and energy within the outermost a part of the sun’s atmosphere, which begins about 1,300 miles above its surface. The team’s idea is supported by data from other satellites and ground-based telescopes showing that jets could be ubiquitous and robust enough to account for the mass and energy of the solar wind. Discovering its origin will help scientists higher understand how stars work and predict how the gusty plasma flow affects life on Earth.
Higher resolution data is required to prove this hypothesis, but to date the evidence is tantalizing. “We sensed from the start that we were on the verge of something big,” says Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist on the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who led the research. “We thought we is likely to be solving a 60-year-old mystery of the solar wind. And I feel we’re.
The existence of the solar wind, first proposed by the late Eugene Parker – the namesake of the Parker Solar Probe – was confirmed by NASA within the early Sixties. Since then, scientists have been perplexed by how this plasma can travel as far and as fast because it does. The solar corona is hot – tens of millions of degrees on any temperature scale – but not hot enough to drive the solar wind to such speeds.
Jets, however, were only discovered in 2014 test led by Raouafi, showing that these mini explosions drive coronal plumes, vivid funnels of magnetized plasma near the solar poles. Looking closely at the bottom of the plumes, he discovered that the jets are created when the sun’s rotating surface brings together two regions of repulsive magnetic polarity until it breaks. But after this text, Raouafi moved on to other projects. “And we principally left it there,” he says.
Then in 2019, while Raouafi was working as a project scientist on the Parker Solar Probe, the craft noticed something strange. As he glided excessive of the crown, he noticed that very often the direction of the magnetic field he was flying through modified. Then he would turn around. Raouafi put together a team to trace down the source of those occasional “turning changes” within the lower atmosphere. His thoughts immediately went to jets. He reasoned that in the event that they might be found elsewhere within the crown and never just within the plumes, there is likely to be enough of them to generate enough material and power to To be the solar wind itself.
