Omkar Dhamane

The Sun constantly emits a stream of charged particles, mostly hydrogen — the solar wind. Sometimes the Sun ejects dense blobs of magnetized gas, inside which calm usually reigns. But in 2000, scientists noticed two regions inside one such cloud where the gas was churning.

October 10, 2024. The Sun hurled a cloud of magnetized plasma toward Earth, and four spacecraft, stationed at a single point between the Sun and Earth, simultaneously recorded how that cloud churned. The distance between the outermost probes was just 80 Earth radii, about half a million kilometers.