Think the wind at your local beach, or up on a mountaintop is bad? Try spitting into the solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing away from the Sun at speeds of nearly a million miles per hour.
This force, which can disrupt the operations of satellites and power grids here on Earth, hasn't been precisely understood. But now new data from Japan's Hinode solar observation satellite, with participation by the European Space Agency, is shedding some light on the process.
Many researchers have looked for the origin of the solar wind in a phenomenon called Alfvén waves, which are magnetic waves rippling through the sun's corona (the solar equivalent of an atmosphere). The waves are created when convection in the hot gas, or even sound waves, toss the existing magnetic fields around.
However, peering far enough into the sun's atmosphere to see this happening has largely been impractical.
Hinode, using a high-resolution X-ray telescope, was able to look deep inside the corona and see record numbers of X-ray jets, essentially fountains of hot plasma. This appears to happen when magnetic fields with opposite charges smash into each other (a process called reconnection) in the lower regions of the solar corona, releasing the Alfvén magnetic waves, as well as the hot jets of plasma, researchers say.
Those fiery collisions seem to be closely related to the stream of gas particles released as solar wind.
Says NASA physicist Jonathan Cirtain, who leads a team studying the data:
Gives a new meaning to the idea of windburn, right?
Hinode: new insights on the origin of solar wind [ESA press release]
(Photo: An image from Hinode, showing an X-ray jet launching plasma from the Sun's north polar coronal hole. Credit: Hinode/ SAO/ NASA/
JAXA/ NAOJ )
