🌞 Parker Solar Probe finds order inside the solar wind's chaos
In the turbulent solar wind, magnetic fields flip the way they spin at very small scales, a pattern now seen directly for the first time.
The mystery
The space around the Sun is filled with a thin, electrically charged gas that churns like a stormy sea and looks completely random. Is there any hidden rule inside that chaos?
The answer
An international team from ten countries, including TU Braunschweig and the University of Tokyo, studied precise magnetic-field measurements from NASA's Parker Solar Probe. They found that the swirling magnetic fields flip the way they spin within a certain range of tiny wavelengths. The effect gets stronger, and moves to longer wavelengths, the farther the solar wind travels from the Sun. It appears right at the boundary where plasma stops behaving like a flowing fluid and starts acting as separate particles. The work appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Now think about this
If scientists can read patterns hidden in the solar wind, could we one day forecast geomagnetic storms the way we forecast rain?
