Tiny plasma jets on the sun drive the elusive solar wind, Europe's Solar Orbiter reveals

[Admin]

Solar scientists have found tiny, short-lived jets of energy on our sun to be the primary drivers of the solar wind, marking a step toward better understanding our sun's elusive behavior.

Tiny plasma jets on the sun drive the elusive solar wind, Europe's Solar Orbiter reveals : Read more

 

[Classical Motion]

Maybe the source but not the driver. The wind is accelerated out of our system. No one knows how.

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

Maybe the source but not the driver. The wind is accelerated out of our system. No one knows how.

No, the wind is not accelerated out of our system, or there would be no heliopause. The wind is accelerated above the surface of the Sun. We also do know how (though it's not completely confirmed), and it has to do with the magnetic field: magnetic reconnection, the same process that drives non-nano solar flares, but on a much smaller scale.

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

Solar scientists have found tiny, short-lived jets of energy on our sun to be the primary drivers of the solar wind, marking a step toward decoding our star's elusive behavior and, eventually, refining predictions of its storms.

This lede is doubly misleading.

The news is not really that we found these tiny short-lived jets, not even that they are connected to the solar wind: the news is that they send out all of the solar wind, not just the faster particles in it as previously thought.

The other is to treat "energy" as a thing rather than a quality. Energy is something particles/fields have. In articles for the general public, electromagnetic radiation is sometimes called "pure energy", but that does not make sense: even if it has no rest mass, it has other qualities beyond its energy. The jets in question aren't even that; they are made up of fast-moving electrons and ions, which have kinetic energy.

Also, if I am really nitpicky, "Sun" should be capitalised.

As for the final part, it's doubtful that studying nanoflares will do much for the prediction of solar storms, which are associated with much more large-scale events.

So it would be best to say something like "Solar scientists have found that tiny, short-lived jets of plasma on our Sun which are powered by magnetism to be the source of all the main components of solar wind, marking a step toward decoding our star's elusive behavior".