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Solar Orbiter Spacecraft Discovers Tiny Jets That Could Power the Solar Wind

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The Solar Orbiter discovered tiny jets from the Sun, potentially explaining the solar wind’s origin. This challenges traditional beliefs about the wind’s generation, with the new data suggesting an intermittent outflow. The findings could also have implications for understanding other stars’ atmospheres. Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team; acknowledgment: Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

 

The ESA/<span class=”glossaryLink” aria-describedby=”tt” data-cmtooltip=”

NASA
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is &quot;To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.&quot; Its core values are &quot;safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion.&quot; NASA conducts research, develops technology and launches missions to explore and study Earth, the solar system, and the universe beyond. It also works to advance the state of knowledge in a wide range of scientific fields, including Earth and space science, planetary science, astrophysics, and heliophysics, and it collaborates with private companies and international partners to achieve its goals.

” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”]”>NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered a multitude of tiny jets of material escaping from the Sun’s outer atmosphere. Each jet lasts between 20 and 100 seconds, and expels <span class=”glossaryLink” aria-describedby=”tt” data-cmtooltip=”

plasma
Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas consisting of positive ions and free electrons. It was first described by chemist Irving Langmuir in the 1920s.

” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”]”>plasma at around 100 km/s (60 miles/s) or 360,000 km/h (220,000 mph). These jets could be the long-sought-after source of the solar wind.

Understanding the Solar Wind

The solar wind is composed of charged particles, known as plasma, that continuously escape the Sun. It propagates outwards through interplanetary space, colliding with anything in its path. When the solar wind collides with Earth’s magnetic field, it produces the aurorae.

 

Although the solar wind is a fundamental feature of the Sun, understanding how and where it is generated near the Sun has proven elusive and has been a key focus of study for decades. Now, thanks to its superior instrumentation, Solar Orbiter has taken us an important step closer.

Tiny Jets Escape the Sun

This mosaic of images shows a multitude of tiny jets of material escaping from the Sun’s outer atmosphere. The images come from the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft. They show up as dark streaks across the solar surface in this mosaic. The images are ‘negatives’ meaning that although the jets are displayed as dark, they are bright flashes against the solar surface. Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team; acknowledgment: Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

 

High-resolution Imaging of the Sun’s Surface

The data comes from Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument. Images of the Sun’s south pole taken by EUI on March 30, 2022, reveal a population of faint, short-lived features that are associated with small jets of plasma being ejected from the Sun’s atmosphere.

 

“We could only detect these tiny jets because of the unprecedented high-resolution, high-cadence images produced by EUI,” says Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, and the principal author on the paper describing this work. In particular, the images were taken in the extreme ultraviolet channel of EUI’s high resolution imager, which observes million-degree solar plasma at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometers.

Of particular importance is the fact that analysis shows that these features are caused by the expulsion of plasma from the solar atmosphere.

[embedded content]
This movie was created from observations taken by the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft on March 30, 2022, between 04:30 and 04:55 <span class=”glossaryLink” aria-describedby=”tt” data-cmtooltip=”

UTC
Coordinated Universal Time or Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time.&nbsp;Prior to 1972, this time was called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and is also known as &quot;Z time&quot; or &quot;Zulu Time.&quot; &nbsp;It is, within about 1 second, mean solar time at 0° longitude.

” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”]”>UTC, and was previously released last year. It shows a ‘coronal hole’ near the Sun’s south pole. Subsequent analysis revealed many tiny jets being released during the observation. They show up as little flashes of bright light across the image. Each one expels charged particles, known as plasma, into space. The circle indicates the size of the Earth for scale. Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team; acknowledgment: Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

Magnetic Structures and the Solar Wind

Researchers have known for decades that a significant fraction of the solar wind is associated with magnetic structures called coronal holes – regions where the Sun’s magnetic field does not turn back down into the Sun. Instead, the magnetic field stretches deep into the Solar System.

 

Plasma can flow along these ‘open’ magnetic field lines, heading into the Solar System, creating the solar wind. But the question was: how did the plasma get launched?

The traditional assumption was that because the corona is hot, it will naturally expand and a portion of it will escape along the field lines. But these new results look into the coronal hole that was situated at the Sun’s south pole, and the individual jets that were revealed challenge the assumption that the solar wind is produced only in a steady continuous flow.

“One of the results here is that to a large extent, this flow is not actually uniform, the ubiquity of the jets suggests that the solar wind from coronal holes might originate as a highly intermittent outflow,” says Andrei Zhukov, Royal Observatory of Belgium, a collaborator on the work who led the Solar Orbiter observing campaign.

ESA Solar Orbiter Facing Sun

ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission will face the Sun from within the orbit of Mercury at its closest approach. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

 

Energy Analysis of the Jets

The energy associated with each individual jet is small. At the top end of coronal phenomena are the X-class solar flares, and at the lower end are the so-called nanoflares. There is a billion times more energy in an X-flare than in a nanoflare. The tiny jets discovered by Solar Orbiter are even less energetic than that, manifesting around a thousand times less energy than a nanoflare, and channelling most of that energy into the expulsion of the plasma.

The ubiquity of them implied by the new observations suggests that they are expelling a substantial fraction of the material we see in the solar wind. And there could be even smaller, more frequent events providing yet more.

“I think it’s a significant step to find something on the disc that certainly is contributing to the solar wind,” says David Berghmans, Royal Observatory of Belgium, and principal investigator for the EUI instrument.

Future Observations and Broader Implications

Currently, Solar Orbiter is still circling the Sun close to its equator. So in these observations, EUI is looking across the south pole at a grazing angle.

 

“It’s harder to measure some of the properties of these tiny jets when seeing them edge-on, but in a few years, we will see them from a different perspective than any other telescopes or observatories so that together should help a lot,” says Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter.

That is because as the mission continues, the spacecraft will gradually incline its orbit towards the polar regions. At the same time, the activity on the Sun will progress through the solar cycle and the coronal holes will begin popping up at many different latitudes, providing a unique new perspective.

All involved will be eager to see what fresh insights they can collect because this work extends further than our own Solar System.

The Sun is the only star whose atmosphere we can observe in such detail, but it is likely that the same process operates on other stars too. That turns these observations into the discovery of a fundamental astrophysical process.

 

Reference: “Picoflare jets power the solar wind emerging from a coronal hole on the Sun” by L. P. Chitta, A. N. Zhukov, D. Berghmans, H. Peter, S. Parenti, S. Mandal, R. Aznar Cuadrado, U. Schühle, L. Teriaca, F. Auchère, K. Barczynski, É. Buchlin, L. Harra, E. Kraaikamp, D. M. Long, L. Rodriguez, C. Schwanitz, P. J. Smith, C. Verbeeck and D. B. Seaton, 24 August 2023, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.ade5801

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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