Ever since the 1950s discovery of the solar wind – the constant flow of charged particles from the sun – there’s been a stark disconnect between this outpouring and the sun itself. As it approaches Earth, the solar wind is gusty and turbulent. But near the sun where it originates, this wind is structured in distinct rays, much like a child’s simple drawing of the sun. The details of the transition from defined rays in the corona, the sun’s upper atmosphere, to the solar wind have been, until now, a mystery.
Using NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, scientists have for the first time imaged the edge of the sun and described that transition, where the solar wind starts. Defining the details of this boundary helps us learn more about our solar neighborhood, which is bathed throughout by solar material – a space environment that we must understand to safely explore beyond our planet. A paper on the findings was published in The Astrophysical Journal on Sept. 1, 2016.
Read the paper:http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-637X/828/2/66
The sun and its atmosphere are made of plasma – a mix of positively and negatively charged particles which have separated at extremely high temperatures, that both carries and travels along magnetic field lines. Material from the corona streams out into space, filling the solar system with the solar wind.
But scientists found that as the plasma travels further away from the sun, things change: The sun begins to lose magnetic control, forming the boundary that defines the outer corona – the very edge of the sun.
In 2018, NASA is scheduled to launch the Solar Probe Plus mission, which will fly into the sun’s corona, collecting more valuable information on the origin and evolution of the solar wind.
Source & further reading:http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/images-from-sun-s-edge-reveal-origins-of-solar-wind
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