The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered a multitude of tiny jets of material escaping from the sun's outer atmosphere. Each jet lasts between 20 and 100 seconds, and expels plasma at around 100 km/s. These jets could be the long-sought-after source of the solar wind.
, that continuously escape the sun. It propagates outwards through interplanetary space, colliding with anything in its path. When the solar wind collides with Earth's magnetic field, it produces the auroras.
"We could only detect these tiny jets because of the unprecedented high-resolution, high-cadence images produced by EUI," says Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, Max Planck Institute for solar system Research, Germany, and the principal author on the paper describing this work. In particular, the images were taken in the extreme ultraviolet channel of EUI's high resolution imager, which observes million-degree solar plasma at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometers.
Researchers have known for decades that a significant fraction of the solar wind is associated with magnetic structures called coronal holes—regions where the sun's magnetic field does not turn back down into the sun. Instead, the magnetic field stretches deep into the solar system. "One of the results here is that to a large extent, this flow is not actually uniform, the ubiquity of the jets suggests that the solar wind from coronal holes might originate as a highly intermittent outflow," says Andrei Zhukov, Royal Observatory of Belgium, a collaborator on the work who led the Solar Orbiter observing campaign. The findings are published in the journalThe energy associated with each individual jet is small.
"It's harder to measure some of the properties of these tiny jets when seeing them edge-on, but in a few years, we will see them from athan any other telescopes or observatories so that together should help a lot," says Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter.
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