Science For All | What are picoflare jets?
The HinduResearchers studying the findings of the Solar Orbiter Aircraft, a joint mission by the European Space Agency and the U.S. space agency NASA, recently announced that they have detected small jets of charged particles intermittently expelled from the sun’s outer atmosphere, at supersonic speeds for 20-100 seconds. According to researchers, picoflare jets may be a source of solar winds, which have important effects on the solar system at large as well as on the earth’s magnetic field. Coronal holes, part of sun’s outer atmosphere with magnetic field lines opening outwards, are already known to be the source region of solar winds. Solar physicist Laxmi Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany is the lead scientist of the team that published the research on picoflare jets.
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