Picoflare jets power the solar wind emerging from a coronal hole on the Sun
Abstract
Coronal holes are areas on the Sun with open magnetic field lines. They are a source region of the solar wind, but how the wind emerges from coronal holes is not known. We observed a coronal hole using the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. We identified jets on scales of a few hundred kilometers, which last 20 to 100 seconds and reach speeds of ~100 kilometers per second. The jets are powered by magnetic reconnection and have kinetic energy in the picoflare range. They are intermittent but widespread within the observed coronal hole. We suggest that such picoflare jets could produce enough high-temperature plasma to sustain the solar wind and that the wind emerges from coronal holes as a highly intermittent outflow at small scales.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.13044,
title = {Picoflare jets power the solar wind emerging from a coronal hole on the Sun},
author = {L. P. Chitta and A. N. Zhukov and D. Berghmans and H. Peter and S. Parenti and S. Mandal and R. Aznar Cuadrado and U. Schühle and L. Teriaca and F. Auchère and K. Barczynski and É. Buchlin and L. Harra and E. Kraaikamp and D. M. Long and L. Rodriguez and C. Schwanitz and P. J. Smith and C. Verbeeck and D. B. Seaton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.13044},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
This is the author's version of the work. The definitive version was published in Science on 24 August 2023