After decades, NASA’s probe provides
Since coronal holes produce solar winds that go from them towards Earth, scientists have been trying to understand them for years. However, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has made it possible for scientists to learn more about these events when it went through the Sun’s upper atmosphere in 2021.
The satellites used for communication on Earth may be impacted by these solar winds, which also produce the aurora borealis, or northern lights.
The information obtained by travelling 13 million miles to the sun, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature by researchers from Berkeley, may aid in the prediction of so-called “solar storms,” which produce “beautiful auroras on Earth” but also “wreak havoc with satellites and the electrical grid.”
Every 22 years, holes occur at the solar poles because these solar winds don’t reach Earth.
Stuart D Bale, a professor of physics at the UC, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park said: “Streams of high-energy particles were detected by the probe. These match the large convection cells inside coronal holes – called supergranulations – suggesting the fast solar winds originate in coronal holes.”
The wind is made during a process called magnetic reconnection and by the time it travels the 93 million miles to Earth, “it has evolved into a homogeneous, turbulent flow of roiling magnetic fields intertwined with charged particles that interact with Earth’s own magnetic field and dump electrical energy into the upper atmosphere.”Stuart D Bale, a professor of physics at the UC, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park said: “Streams of high-energy particles were detected by the probe. These match the large convection cells inside coronal holes – called supergranulations – suggesting the fast solar winds originate in coronal holes.”The satellites used for communication on Earth may be impacted by these solar winds, which also produce the aurora borealis, or northern lights.
