The solar orbital captures incredible footage of small jets near the south pole of the sun

For nearly five years, the sun monitoring probe has made close approaches to the sun, capturing a close -up of the star’s polar regions to collect clues for its magnetic activity, crown and atmosphere. During the two recent flies, the solar orbital noticed small jets of material that look like thin, hair -like, brightly flashing near the South Pole of the Sun, which turned out to be a surprising source of sunny wind.

The Sun Orbiter of the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered The jets flashing on the surface of the sun in 2023. Subsequent observations not only confirmed that there were small jets, but also revealed them as the source of the two main forms of sunny wind, fast and slow. Scientists have known for decades, where a fast sunny wind came from, but the source of slow sunny wind was elusive, until the on -board cameras of the solar orbital notice more than these small jets. The new findings are detailed in a exploration Posted on Wednesday in the magazine astronomy and astrophysics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66BZWSWXXYQ

The upper 40-second video is an accelerated footage of the newly discovered jets, flashing briefly near the South Pole of the Sun. In fact, Jets glow for about one minute, throwing charged particles at explosive speeds of about 62 miles per second (100 kilometers per second).

The solar wind is a stream of charged particles that stem from the crown of the sun – the most outer layer of its atmosphere – and travels throughout the solar system. The fast sunny wind comes from dark spots in the atmosphere of the sun called coronal holes, or regions in which the magnetic field of the sun does not turn back into the sun, but more recently traveling out into the solar system, according to the solar system EsaS The charged particles use the lines of the magnetic field to flow away from the sun, creating a sunny wind.

To understand how these particles are fired from the sun first, the researchers behind Discovery combined images with high resolution of the solar orbital with direct measurements of solar wind particles and the magnetic field of the sun. Doing this, they were able to connect the solar wind back to the jets observed by the solar orbital. Surprisingly, researchers can also track a slow sunny wind to the small jets. “The fact that the same basic process drives both fast and slow sun winds comes as a surprise,” ESA writes.

Solar Orbiter started in February 2020, carrying its on -board telescope to only about a quarter of Earth’s distance from the sun to provide high resolution observations close to the host star. The spacecraft makes two close approaches to the sun every year, and the researchers behind the new study hope to collect more data on the small jets and how they release a sunny wind during the next drill of the probe.