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 (60 miles/s) or 360,000 km/h (220,000 mph). These jets could be the long-sought-after so
The Solar Orbiter discovered tiny jets from the Sun, potentially explaining the solar wind’s origin. This challenges traditional beliefs about the wind’s generation, with the new data suggesting an intermittent outflow. The findings could also have implications for understanding other stars’ atmospheres.
“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.
Plasma can flow along these ‘open’ magnetic field lines, heading into the Solar System, creating the solar wind. But the question was: how did the plasma get launched? ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission will face the Sun from within the orbit of Mercury at its closest approach. Credit: ESA/ATG medialabThe energy associated with each individual jet is small. At the top end of coronal phenomena are the X-class solar flares, and at the lower end are the so-called nanoflares. There is a billion times more energy in an X-flare than in a nanoflare.
“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 a different perspective than any other telescopes or observatories so that together should help a lot,” says Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter.towards the polar regions.
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