Origin of Solar Winds..

Interesting article posted today by NASSA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

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.

“Now we have a global picture of solar wind evolution,” said Nicholeen Viall, a co-author of the paper and a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is really going to change our understanding of how the space environment develops.” Both near Earth and far past Pluto, our space environment is dominated by activity on the sun. 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. “As you go farther from the sun, the magnetic field strength drops faster than the pressure of the material does,” said Craig DeForest, lead author of the paper and a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Eventually, the material starts to act more like a gas, and less like a magnetically structured plasma.” The breakup of the rays is similar to the way water shoots out from a squirt gun. First, the water is a smooth and unified stream, but it eventually breaks up into droplets, then smaller drops and eventually a fine, misty spray. The images in this study capture the plasma at the same stage where a stream of water gradually disintegrates into droplets.

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a reply to: skywatcher44

Are you a member of the Suspicious0bservers by chance? If not, you should check them out. Mind blowing stuff to see there.

spaceweathernews.com...

www.suspicious0bservers.org...

earthchanges.org...

Learning about the solar wind can lead to learning so much more.

Time well spent looking into the subject.

a reply to: skywatcher44

Solar wind is like the farts of the sun. Cool!

a reply to: Bobaganoosh

I pick up the you tube presentations and the tweets from S. O and Ben. Not a member though, maybe one day.

www.youtube.com...

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" Eyes open ! No fear ! Be safe everyone "

a reply to: skywatcher44

The Sun is such a masterpiece really.

It controls our weather on this planet and one day we will have space weather predicting our weather here.

Will watch the video later when I can. Thanks for bringing this news to ATS although I am not sure which part is new. I thought we knew all that already but I guess not.