NASA probe captures the inside of the Sun's coronal mass ejection for the first time
NASA's spacecraft made the first observations inside the CME when the plasma stream had just burst out of the Sun. What it discovered was a real sensation. The WISPR instrument of the Parker Solar Probe recorded clear turbulent vortices inside the CME.
This was reported by SSPDaily.
These vortices represent the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), according to physicists. According to them, KHI events occur whenever one part of a rapidly moving fluid interacts with another. On Earth. KHI occurs in clouds when the wind speed at one end of the cloud differs from the wind speed at the other.
Physicists believe that the KHI exists in coronal mass ejections of the Sun because the plasma does not move in the same way as the background solar wind. Scientists had no way to test this theory. However, thanks to the NASA probe, they succeeded.
The Parker Solar Probe was sent into space to study the Sun in 2018. Thanks to its elliptical orbit, NASA's spacecraft will plunge into the Sun's corona closer than ever. In fact, it is the first spacecraft to enter the upper atmosphere of our star at a distance of 11.5 solar radii from its surface. The Sun's radius is almost 700 thousand kilometers.
