Magnetic tornadoes, the source of solar winds

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36998


Solar Wind Origin in Coronal Funnels

22 Apr 2005

A Chinese-German team of scientists have identified the magnetic structures in the solar corona where the fast solar wind originates. Using images and Doppler maps from the Solar Ultraviolet Measurements of Emitted Radiation (SUMER) spectrometer and magnetograms delivered by the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) on the space-based Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) of ESA and NASA, they observed solar wind flows coming from funnel-shaped magnetic fields which are anchored in the lanes of the magnetic network near the surface of the Sun.




"The fine magnetic structure of the source region of the solar wind has remained elusive" said first author Prof. Chuanyi Tu, from the Department of Geophysics of the Peking University in Beijing, China. "For many years, solar and space physicists have observed fast solar wind streams coming from coronal regions with open magnetic field lines and low light intensity, the so called coronal holes. However, only by combining complex observations from SOHO in a novel way have we been able to infer the properties of the sources inside coronal holes. The fast solar wind seems to originate in coronal funnels with a speed of about 10 kms-1 at a height of 20 000 km above the photosphere".

"The fast solar wind starts to flow out from the top of funnels in coronal holes with a flow speed of about 10 kms-1", states Prof. Tu. "This outflow is seen as large patches in Doppler blue shift (hatched areas in the above figure) of a spectral line emitted by neon ions at a temperature of 600 000 K, which can be used as a good tracer for the hot plasma flow. Through a comparison with the magnetic field, as extrapolated from the photosphere by means of the MDI magnetic data, we found that the blue-shift pattern of this line correlates best with the open field structures at 20 000 km."


ON EDIT TO ADD, this cool video of a comet losing its tail due to a very strong solar wind blast...

Anything that measues 600,000 on the Kelvin scale is pretty dang hot as far as space goes.