Three months ago, scientists spotted tiny, short-lived energy jets surfacing from dark regions within the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere.
Upon closer look, these jets appeared as vibrant flashes in every single place on the sun‘s disk. They lasted only 20 to 100 seconds but packed a robust punch: A single minute-long jet carried energy akin to the facility consumed by 10,000 homes within the U.K. in a 12 months.
These findings got here from data gathered by Solar Orbiter, a probe operated jointly by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA that has been capturing images of the sun since June 2020. The spacecraft’s discoveries over the past three years, including the detection of “picojets” or “picoflares,” were shared on Wednesday (Dec. 13) on the 2023 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a conference being held this week in San Francisco and online.
“What we see is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Yannis Zouganelis of ESA, the deputy project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission.
Picojets barely stick out of the chromosphere — the layer just underneath the corona — so images of the sun have captured only their suggestions. Nevertheless, those images are helping scientists higher understand how and where the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing constantly from the sun, originates.
Insert video:
These minuscule jets may be contributing to coronal heating at some level, even though it remains to be too early to verify, Zouganelis added. If the jets are indeed involved, solar scientists would get a step closer to decoding the longstanding mystery of precisely why the sun’s corona is a shocking 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius) hotter than its visible “surface.”
Zouganelis said his team was also surprised by so-called campfires, barely larger, flickering flares the dimensions of a European country sprinkled across the sun’s disk. These were imaged by Solar Orbiter as soon because it began operations in 2020, marking the probe’s first science discovery.
“It is not that we have not seen them before,” said Zouganelis. “It’s that we have not seen as many.”
The approaching months could offer more clues to the longstanding coronal heating problem. In September, Solar Orbiter teamed up with one other spacecraft, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which studies the sun in a complementary manner. By combining remote-sensing observations and in-situ measurements in what scientists call a “scientific first,” the 2 spacecraft could together offer more robust data needed to raised understand the phenomenon.