Kristopher G. Klein

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.

The scorching gas streaming from the Sun is not a continuous flow but rather a soup of charged particles. In this soup, waves constantly boil up: electric fields flare and fade like ripples on water from a tossed stone. One such wave is the ion-ion acoustic wave.