The spacecraft's data point to showerhead-like 'coronal holes' as the source of the fast solar wind.
match so-called"supergranulation flows" within coronal holes. This discovery pointed to these regions as the source of the"fast" solar wind, which is seen over the poles of the sun and can reach speeds as great as 1.7 million mph , around 1,000 times faster than the top speed of a jet fighter.
"Winds carry lots of information from the sun to Earth, so understanding the mechanism behind the sun's wind is important for practical reasons on Earth," team co-leader and University of Maryland-College Park professor James Drake said in a statement."That's going to affect our ability to understand how the sun releases energy and drives geomagnetic storms, which are a threat to our communication networks.
"The photosphere is covered by convection cells, like in a boiling pot of water, and the larger-scale convection flow is called supergranulation," research co-leader Stuart Bale, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the same statement.
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