Aerospace Electronic and Defense Systems: Picoflare jets power the solar wind emerging from a coronal hole on the Sun

Picoflare jets power the solar wind emerging from a coronal hole on the Sun | Science

Science

24 Aug 2023

Vol 381, Issue 6660

pp. 867-872

Editor’s summary

Plasma is constantly streaming away from the Sun, forming the solar wind. A likely source of this plasma is coronal holes, regions of the Sun’s corona with magnetic field lines that open outward. Chitta et al. observed a coronal hole in the extreme ultraviolet using the Solar Orbiter spacecraft and identifed several types of small-scale jets within it (see the Perspective by Ugarte-Urra and Wang). Large numbers of jets occurred during the observation, but each one lasted only a few dozen seconds. The authors calculated that the jets provide enough energy and plasma to supply a large fraction of the solar wind, at least during quiet periods. —Keith T. Smith

Abstract

Coronal holes are areas on the Sun with open magnetic field lines. They are a source region of the solar wind, but how the wind emerges from coronal holes is not known. We observed a coronal hole using the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. We identified jets on scales of a few hundred kilometers, which last 20 to 100 seconds and reach speeds of ~100 kilometers per second. The jets are powered by magnetic reconnection and have kinetic energy in the picoflare range. They are intermittent but widespread within the observed coronal hole. We suggest that such picoflare jets could produce enough high-temperature plasma to sustain the solar wind and that the wind emerges from coronal holes as a highly intermittent outflow at small scales.

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Volume 381 | Issue 6660
25 August 2023

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Solar Orbiter is a space mission with international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. The EUI instrument was built by CSL, IAS, MPS, MSSL/UCL, PMOD/WRC, ROB, and LCF/IO with funding from the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO/PRODEX PEA 4000134088), the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the UK Space Agency (UKSA), the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi) through the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), and the Swiss Space Office (SSO). This research has made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System.

Funding: L.P.C. acknowledges funding by the European Union (ERC, ORIGIN, 101039844). S.P. acknowledges funding by CNES through the Multi Experiment Data & Operation Center (MEDOC). D.M.L. thanks the Science and Technology Facilities Council for the award of an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship (ST/R003246/1). A.N.Z., D.B., E.K., L.R., and C.V. thank the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) for the provision of financial support in the framework of the PRODEX Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) under contract nos. 4000134474 and 4000136424.

Author contributions: L.P.C. led the study and data analysis and wrote the manuscript with inputs from A.N.Z., D.B., H.P., S.P., S.M., R.A.C., U.S., L.T., É.B., D.M.L., and D.B.S. F.A., E.K., and C.V. contributed to data reduction. A.N.Z. led the Solar Orbiter observing campaign. D.B. is the principal investigator of EUI. All authors discussed and interpreted the results.

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Data and materials availability: The HRI_EUV level-2 data are archived by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (51). We used observations in the time range of 30 March 2022 04:30 to 05:00 UT (files from solo_L2_eui-hrieuvnon-image_20220330T043000227_V01.fits to solo_L2_eui-hrieuvnon-image_20220330T045957224_V01.fits). The data can alternatively be retrieved from ESA’s Solar Orbiter Archive https://soar.esac.esa.int/soar/ using the same time range and the Solar Orbiter Observing Plan (SOOP) (52) name “R_SMALL_HRES_MCAD_Polar-Observations.”

License information: Copyright © 2023 the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original US government works. https://www.science.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse. This research was funded in whole or in part by the European Union through Horizon Europe (grant no. 101039844), a cOAlition S organization. The author will make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version available under a CC BY public copyright license.

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E. Kraaikamp

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Science Technology and Facilities Council: ST/R003246/1

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L. P. Chitta et al.

Picoflare jets power the solar wind emerging from a coronal hole on the Sun.Science381,867-872(2023).DOI:10.1126/science.ade5801

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