Wild Video Shows Solar Winds Spiraling Millions of Miles From the Sun

Behold, the piping host particles of solar wind streaming from our Sun, caught in new footage from the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter. The video was captured by the orbiter’s Metis instrument, a coronagraph which blocks light directly from the Sun in order to see fainter phenomena in its outer atmosphere, or corona. New research describing the observations was published today in The Astrophysical Journal. “In this paper, we present observations by Metis during its perihelion passage of a striking helical radial structure that extended from 1.5 to 3 [solar radii] and lasted for more than 3 hr,” the team wrote. “To the best of our knowledge, these observations are unique, in that they appear to show directly the long-duration outflow of Alfvénic solar wind into the heliosphere.” The solar radius is 432,690 miles (696,347 kilometers), so the structure described by the team extended as far as 1,298,070 miles (2,089,041 kilometers)—it’s a pretty large structure! The video was taken by Metis on ... Read full article.