So-called 'picojets' spotted by ESA's Solar Orbiter could be feeding high-speed gas outflows from the sun in the form of both energy and matter.
Solar scientists have spotted small-scale, short-lived jets of energy emerging from dark holes in the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, for the first time.
"Jets, in general, have previously been observed in the solar corona," Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, head of the discovery crew and Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research team leader, told Space.com."The picoflare jets that we observed are the smallest, and energetically the weakest, type of jets in the solar corona that were not observed before."
"Still," he continued,"the energy content of a single picoflare jet that lives for about 1 minute is equal to the average power consumed by about 10,000 households in the UK over an entire year." The team also has an idea about what may be creating picojets in coronal holes, pointing to magnetic reconnection as the likely driver of the phenomena. Magnetic reconnection, in this case, refers to the breaking and reconnecting of magnetic field lines that ultimately releases a tremendous amount of stored energy. In fact, this activity is is a fundamental process for stars.
"Coronal holes are maintained by 'open' magnetic fields of the sun. Usually, magnetic fields loop back to the solar surface, but in these open field regions, the lines of force stretch into interplanetary space," Chitta explained."The ionized gas freely escapes, and the corona appears darker here compared to the surrounding regions filled with closed magnetic fields that trap hot plasma and thus appear brighter.
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