The NASA/ESA Solar Orbiter is studying picoflares on the Sun that may well be an important source of the solar wind.
Although this wind is a fundamental feature of the Sun, solar physicists haven’t always had a definitive explanation for what generates it. They’ve known for quite some time that it’s mostly associated with coronal holes. These are magnetic structures in the corona and appear as dark regions on the solar surface. Essentially, they’re places in the solar atmosphere where the magnetic field doesn’t duck back down into the Sun.
Coronal holes can appear nearly anywhere on the Sun, although they occur quite often around the polar regions. They seem to be more common and last longer during the quiet part of the solar cycle . However, they also show up during solar maximum.The idea of jets and outbursts from the Sun is not new and solar physicists observe a range of them. The largest are coronal mass ejections. These carry huge amounts of energetic particles out through space.
Picoflares carry less power than nanoflares. Those tiny jets discovered by Solar Orbiter show about a thousand times less energy than a nanoflare. However, they seem to pack a mighty punch. Most of their energy gets channeled into ejecting plasma away from the Sun. That contributes to the near-constant flow of the solar wind. They’re ubiquitous enough that they probably eject a larger fraction of the solar wind than expected.
A sequence of Solar Orbiter images showing tiny jets called “picoflares” escaping the Sun and helping to create the solar wind. Courtesy: ESA. There’s still quite a bit to learn about this process, but ongoing Solar Orbiter studies should help explain the mechanism further. “One of the results here is that to a large extent, this flow is not actually uniform, the ubiquity of the jets suggests that the solar wind from coronal holes might originate as a highly intermittent outflow,” said Andrei Zhukov, Royal Observatory of Belgium, a collaborator on the work who led the Solar Orbiter observing campaign..
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