Protecting The Electric Grid: NASA's Parker Solar Probe Unveils Solar Wind Origin

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has achieved a major milestone by flying close to the sun and detecting the fine structure of the solar wind near its source.

This discovery reveals details that are lost as the wind exits the sun’s corona, providing crucial insights into the origin of the solar wind and solar storms that can have detrimental effects on Earth, Physics at Berkeley reports.

Unveiling the Solar Wind’s Origin

According to a paper published in the journal Nature, the Parker Solar Probe has detected streams of high-energy particles that match the supergranulation flows within coronal holes. This suggests that these regions are the source of the “fast” solar wind. Professor Stuart D. Bale of University of California, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park led the team of scientists behind this discovery.

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The Role of Coronal Holes

Coronal holes are areas where magnetic field lines emerge from the sun’s surface without looping back inward, forming open field lines that expand outward and fill most of the space around the sun. Understanding how and where the solar wind originates will help predict solar storms that can disrupt satellites and the electrical grid.

Understanding the Mechanism

Based on the team’s analysis, the coronal holes are like showerheads, with jets emerging from bright spots where magnetic field lines funnel into and out of the sun’s surface. When oppositely directed magnetic fields pass one another in these funnels, the fields often break and reconnect, slinging charged particles out of the sun.

Implications of the Discovery

Based on the presence of some extremely high-energy particles detected by the Parker Solar Probe, the researchers concluded that the wind could only be made by this process, which is called magnetic reconnection. This discovery provides strong evidence that magnetic reconnection within these funnel structures is the energy source of the fast solar wind.

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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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