The solar wind is a stream of superheated, charged particles emanating from the sun that can reach speeds of more than 1 million miles per hour.
The tiny jets that the researchers observed could be seen emanating from a structure on the sun known as a coronal hole. These vast holes are regions where the sun's magnetic field does not turn back down into the star. Instead, the magnetic field stretches out deep into the solar system.
The study also challenges previous assumptions that the high-speed solar wind from coronal holes emerges in flows that are relatively steady. The researchers found that to a large extent, this flow is not actually uniform but is instead highly intermittent. "I think it's a significant step to find something on the disc that certainly is contributing to the solar wind," David Berghmans, principal investigator for the EUI instrument with the Royal Observatory of Belgium, said in the press release.
But as the Solar Orbiter mission continues, it will gradually incline its orbit toward the uncharted polar regions
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