Lucky alignment of two spacecraft reveals how solar wind gets a magnetic push! ☀️ #shorts

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Fast’ solar wind moves with speeds above 500 km/s. Curiously, this wind exits the Sun’s corona with lower speeds, so something speeds it up as it moves farther away. The million-degree wind naturally cools down as it expands into a larger volume and becomes less dense, much like the air on Earth as you climb a mountain. And yet, it cools more slowly than expected from this effect alone.

So, what provides the necessary energy to accelerate and heat the fastest parts of the solar wind?

Data from our Solar Orbiter and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have provided conclusive evidence that the answer is large-scale oscillations in the Sun’s magnetic field, known as Alfvén waves.

📹 ESA – European Space Agency
📸 ESA/NASA

#ESA #Sun #SolarWinds

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12 Comments

  1. Is it possible that yhe solar winds have the same energy state and to themselves are traveling at the same speed, and that its the suns gravity that effects their speed to us? Like. The closed to the sun they are the more gravity there is pulling them back

  2. Alfven waves – look them up: ‘In situ observations of large amplitude Alfvén waves heating and accelerating the solar wind’, Volume 385, Issue 6712 of the journal Science.

  3. Solar wind keeps accelerating as it travels through space. Interesting? It sounds like external force acting on it? Gravitational force from nearby planets?) As mentioned in this video, "large-scale oscillation in the Sun's magnetic field", hope to see more details about this "Alfven waves" in the future. Thanks.

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