NASA explores solar wind with new view of small sun structures

Scientists have combined NASA data and cutting-edge image processing to gain new insight into the solar structures that create the Sun's flow of high-speed solar wind, detailed in new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal.

This first look at relatively small features, dubbed "plumelets," could help scientists understand how and why disturbances form in the solar wind.

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Credits: NASA/SDO/Uritsky, et al

Scientists used image processing on high-resolution images of the Sun to reveal distinct “plumelets” within structures on the Sun called solar plumes.

The full-disk Sun and the left side of the inset image were captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light and processed to reduce noise.

The right side of the inset has been further processed to enhance small features in the images, revealing the edges of the plumelets in clear detail.

These plumelets could help scientists understand how and why disturbances in the solar wind form.

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Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez

During its first solar flyby in November 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe observed switchbacks — sudden reversals in the magnetic field of the solar wind, illustrated here.

Newly-observed solar plumelets might produce similar signatures to switchbacks.

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NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission has returned unprecedented data from near the Sun, culminating in new discoveries published on Dec. 4, 2019, in the journal Nature.

Among the findings are new understandings of how the Sun's constant outflow of material, the solar wind, behaves. Seen near Earth -- where it can interact with our planet's natural magnetic field and cause space weather effects that interfere with technology -- the solar wind appears to be a relatively uniform flow of plasma.

But Parker Solar Probe's observations reveal a complicated, active system not seen from Earth.

See the Solar Wind Blast Away From Sun in NASA Animation

See the constant stream of plasma and particles, known as solar wind, emanating from the Sun in this animation.