We know the sun belches out solar winds, but the origin of these streams of charged particles remain a mystery and has been the subject of numerous studies over the past decades. The images captured last year by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument aboard ESA’s and NASA’s Solar Orbiter, however, may have finally given us the knowledge needed to explain what powers these winds. In a paper published in Science, a team of researchers described observing large numbers of jets coming out of a dark region of the sun called a “coronal hole” in the images taken by the spacecraft.
The team called them “picoflare jets,” because they contain around one-trillionth the energy of what the largest solar flares can generate. These picoflare jets measure a few hundred kilometers in length, reach speeds of around 100 kilometers per second and only last between 20 and 100 seconds. Still, the researchers believe they have the power to emit enough high-temperature plasma to be considered a…
2023-08-25 06:45:04
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