Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur.
has, for the first time, traced the solar wind in space to a specific location on our sun's surface, opening a new way to study the origins of solar winds, scientists reported on Tuesday ."Solar wind" refers to pockets of charged particles blasted from our sun, which are sometimes directed toward Earth. A rare cluster of such storms sparked breathtaking auroras around the world earlier this month, which were likelyin the past 500 years.
Yet, despite decades of research, details about the origins of the solar wind remain murky. Scientists have suspected the streams of charged particles carry unique identifiers about regions on the sun they emerge from, but those"footprints" are often smeared out by the time they reachOne of the main goals of Solar Orbiter was to help scientists find those footprints and use them to trace the solar wind to specific regions on the's surface.
When the probe glided inside the orbit of Mercury in March 2022 during its first close approach to the sun, it cataloged the chemical makeup of solar wind streams it encountered. This chemical composition is known to differ depending on where the stream emerged from, and helped scientists trace a type of slower-moving solar wind, which travels less than 310 miles per second , to its source on the sun.
"We saw a lot of complexity that we could tie back to the source regions," study lead author Stephanie Yardley of Northumbria University in the U.K. said in the statement.More specifically, from the probe's images of the sun's surface, scientists could pinpoint streams of slow wind blasted from regions on the sun where two kinds of magnetic field lines met: open, which are anchored to the sun on one end, and closed, which are the bright loops rooted on both ends.
"The instrument teams spent more than a decade designing, building and preparing their sensors for launch, as well as planning how best to operate them in a coordinated way," study co-author Christopher Owen of the University College London said in a."So it is highly gratifying to now see the data being put together to reveal which regions of the Sun are driving the slow solar wind and its variability.
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