The average person goes through life seeing the Sun primarily as a glowing orb of unchanging light that they should know will burn their eyes if they do more than glance across its place in the sky. Observed with the appropriate equipment, the Sun reveals more and more complexity the more we zoom in. To an observer anywhere in the solar system, the Sun is the source of a permanent wind that, like our own world’s moving air, changes in pattern and strength. Just as a small depression in the atmosphere off the coast of Africa can intensify into a hurricane, tiny features in the Sun’s atmosphere seem capable of magnifying into magnificent storms of a very different variety, as fluctuating magnetic fields accelerate charged particles. 

Now, using a combination of high-resolution data from various NASA missions, researchers have carefully studied how tiny plumelets can evolve over time, affecting space weather solar system wide.

These plumelets are only a few thousand miles across and can combine to form fifty to one hundred thousand-mile across plumes. What else they can do is still to be learned, but in their paper, which appears in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers led by Vadim Uritsky hint that they may be responsible for features as weird as sudden reversals in the solar winds magnetic field that were observed by the Parker Solar Probe last November.

This is a newly discovered phenomenon, and exactly what it does and doesn’t do will take time to understand. 

More Information

NASA press release

“Plumelets: Dynamic Filamentary Structures in Solar Coronal Plumes,” V.M. Uritsky et al., 2021 January 19, The Astrophysical Journal