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The solar wind isn't a calm stream but a bubbling soup of charged particles. Diving close to the Sun, the Parker probe picked up two types of stirring waves. Left-handed ones, like a whisk in a chef's hand, whip up the material when the temperature differs along and across the flow. They rage nearly a third of the time near the star, boosting the share of the fastest particles — much like a mixer pushing foam to the surface.

Right-handed waves

Fine analysis of light (spectroscopy) and machine learning captured the moment when thermal jets give birth to right-handed waves. Paradoxically, it's this invisible ripple, not grand eruptions, that heats the giant corona — its temperature is hundreds of times that of the solar surface. The rhythm of these waves determines space weather near Earth.