Solar Orbiter Spacecraft Uncovers Source of Solar Winds
The source of solar winds, which are streams of charged particles emitted by the sun, has long been a puzzle for scientists. However, recent images taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on board the Solar Orbiter, a joint mission by ESA and NASA, may have provided the answers. These Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_discovers_tiny_jets_that_could_power_the_solar_wind” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>images captured numerous jets emanating from a dark area on the sun known as a “coronal hole.” The findings, published in Science, shed light on the mechanism behind these powerful solar winds.
The team called them “picoflare jets” because they contain about a trillionth of the energy that the largest solar flares can produce. These picoflare jets are a few hundred kilometers long, reach speeds of about 100 kilometers per second, and last only 20-100 seconds. Still, scientists believe they have the power to send out enough high-temperature plasma to be considered a significant source of our system’s solar wind. Although coronal holes have long been known as the source areas of the phenomenon, researchers are still trying to find out the mechanism of how plasma currents rise from them exactly. This discovery could finally be the answer they had been looking for for years.
Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, the study’s lead author from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, told Space: “The picoflare jets we observed are the smallest and most energetically weak types of jets in the solar corona not observed before. . . . Yet the energy content of one picoflare jet lasting about a minute is equivalent to about 10 000 average household energy consumption in the UK throughout the year.”
Chitta’s team continues to monitor coronal holes and other possible sources of the solar wind using Solar Orbiter. In addition to gathering data that may finally give us answers about the plasma currents responsible for producing the aurora borealis here on our planet, their observations may also shed light on why the Sun’s Corona, or atmosphere, is much, much hotter than its surface.
