NASA’s sun-touching Parker Solar Probe got close enough to our star to see fine details of the solar wind, including the origin of “coronal holes” in the Sun’s atmosphere. Armed with this information, scientists can now make better predictions. solar stormsmay increase aurora borealis however, it can disrupt communications and energy infrastructure and pose a threat to satellites, spacecraft and even astronauts.

According to a new study, the investigation Parker Solar Probe He tracked the solar wind, a stream of constantly flowing charged particles. the sun – where it is produced. This allowed the researchers to see features of the solar wind that are lost as it leaves the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or crownand before reaching Earth as a relatively homogeneous stream.

The spacecraft saw streams of high-energy particles formed. solar wind, corresponds to the so-called “supergranulation flows” inside the coronal holes. This discovery indicates that these regions are the source of the “fast” solar wind, which is visible above the Sun’s poles and can reach speeds of 1.7 million mph (2.7 million kilometers per hour), about 1,000 times the maximum speed. war plane.

Coronal holes are believed to be It occurs in regions where magnetic field lines leave the Sun’s surface but do not return there. This causes streaks of radiating open field to appear that fill the space around the Sun.

During quiet periods of our star’s 11-year activity cycle, coronal holes are usually found at the Sun’s poles. This means that the solar wind emanating from the coronal holes is usually not directed towards Earth. But as the sun becomes more active and its magnetic field “spins”, alternating poles, coronal holes become more common, and these streams of powerfully charged particles can be directed towards our planet. This information and these new findings could help predict potentially devastating solar storms, the research team said.

“Winds carry a lot of information from the Sun to Earth, so understanding the mechanism behind the solar wind is important for practical reasons on Earth,” said James Drake, co-leader of the team and University of Maryland College Park professor. Said. “This will impact our ability to understand how the sun releases energy and causes geomagnetic storms that threaten our communications networks.”

sun shower

According to the team members, the coronal holes work like a shower head, spewing jets of charged particles from evenly spaced “bright spots” where magnetic fields emanate from the Sun’s surface. This creates sinkholes about 18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers) wide; Soil can be seen as bright “streams” inside the coronal holes.

The team believes that when magnetic fields in opposite directions pass through each other in these funnels, the magnetic field lines are broken and then reconnected. It is this process, called magnetic reconnection, that is responsible for ejecting the charged particles we see as the solar wind.

Scientists determined this due to the fact that the speed of some observed particles is 10 times faster than the average of the solar wind – this is possible only with the help of such a powerful phenomenon as magnetic reconnection. Such velocities are not possible for particles simply moving in plasma, according to team members.

“The photosphere is lined with convection cells, like a pot of boiling water, and the larger-scale convection flow is called supergranulation,” said co-author Stuart Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. expression. (The photosphere is the surface of the Sun.)

“Where these supergranulation cells meet and go down, they pull the magnetic field toward that funnel,” Bale added. “There the magnetic field becomes very strong because it just gets stuck. It’s kind of like a wasted scoop of magnetic field.”

Bale added that what the team saw when looking at data collected as the Parker Solar Probe approached the sun was the spatial separation of these tiny troughs or sinkholes.

“The big implication is that the energy source for the fast solar wind is magnetic reconnection inside these funnel-like structures,” Bale said. Said. “It doesn’t come from anywhere in the coronal hole; it has substructure in coronal holes leading to supergranulation cells. It comes from these tiny bundles of magnetic energy associated with convection currents. In our view, our results provide compelling evidence that this is what reconnection does.”