The new data could help explain why and how solar wind accelerates at great speeds across the solar system.
The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter probe made the first-ever remote sensing observation of a solar "switchback", accordingThe new data gathered by the mission sheds new light on a mysterious phenomenon that had only been hypothesized until now. It could help explain how solar wind is propelled across the solar system at incredibly fast speeds.The ESA described its new observation as the "first evidence of a switchback in the solar corona".
Scientists compared images taken by Solar Orbiter's cameras at different wavelengths and they found that the switchback phenomenon occurred just above an active sunspot — a cooler region of the sun characterized by dense and twisted magnetic fields.The new observations seem to match mathematical models of switchback triggering developed by Zank, a space physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
The switchback phenomenon was first spotted in METIS data on March 25 by Daniele Telloni, a solar physicist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Torino, Italy. The new observation could provide new insight into the surprising role of switchbacks throughout our solar system. Scientists believe they may play an important role in the acceleration and heating of the solar wind — a phenomenon that is currently unexplained by science.
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