Mixer Waves of the Solar Wind: How the Corona Heats Up ⚡ экспресс
The Parker Solar Probe discovered that closer to the Sun, special waves appear more often in the solar wind — like ripples spreading from a stone thrown into water, but in plasma. They carry energy and help us understand how the solar corona heats up. Where does this energy go next?
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.
🎯 The solar wind carries away about the mass of Mount Everest every minute.