Donald Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC February 4, 1999

(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Bill Steigerwald
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-5017)

RELEASE: 99-11

SOHO SPACECRAFT DETECTS SOURCE OF HIGH-SPEED SOLAR "WIND"

Solving a long-standing solar mystery, scientists have

discovered the source of fountains of electrified gas that flow
from the Sun like water gushing through cracks in a dam. Called
the high-speed solar wind, this gas flows out at two million miles
per hour from the edges of honeycomb-shaped patterns of magnetic
fields at the surface of the Sun.

American and European scientists detected the source using the

NASA/European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
(SOHO) spacecraft. The nature and origin of the solar wind is one
of the main mysteries SOHO was designed to solve.

"The search for the source of the solar wind has been like the
hunt for the source of the Nile," said Dr. Don Hassler of the
Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, lead author of the
paper, published in the Feb. 5 issue of SCIENCE magazine. "For
thirty years, scientists have observed high-speed solar wind coming
from regions in the solar atmosphere with open magnetic-field
lines, called coronal holes. However, only recently, with the
observations from SOHO, have we been able to measure the detailed
structure of this source region inside coronal holes."

Scientists have long thought that the solar wind flows from
coronal holes. What is new is the discovery that these flows are
concentrated in specific patches at the edges of the honeycomb-
shaped magnetic fields. Just below the surface of the Sun there
are large convection cells, and each cell has a magnetic field
associated with it.

"If one thinks of these cells as paving stones in a patio,

then the solar wind is breaking through like grass around the
edges, concentrated in the corners where the paving stones
meet," said Dr. Helen Mason, of the University of Cambridge,
England, co-author of the paper. "However, at speeds starting at
20,000 mph at the surface and accelerating to over two million mph,
the solar wind 'grows' much faster than grass."

The research will lead to better understanding of the high-

speed solar wind, a stream of electrified gas that affects the
Earth's space environment. The solar wind comes in two varieties:
high speed and low speed. The low-speed solar wind moves at
roughly a million miles per hour, while the high-speed wind is even
faster, up to two million miles per hour.

As it flows past Earth, the solar wind can cause dramatic

changes in the shape and structure of the Earth's magnetic field,
variations in which can affect satellites and disrupt
communications and power systems on Earth.

The Solar Ultraviolet Measurements of Emitted Radiation

(SUMER) spectrometer instrument on SOHO detected the solar wind by
observing the ultraviolet spectrum (a separation of light into its
component colors, or wavelengths) over a large area of the solar
north polar region. By analyzing light this way, astronomers learn
a great deal about the object emitting the light, such as its
temperature, chemical composition and motion.

The hot gas in the solar-wind source region emits light at

certain ultraviolet wavelengths. When the hot gas in the solar
wind flows toward Earth, the wavelengths of the ultraviolet light
emitted become shorter, a phenomenon called Doppler shift. This is
similar to the way an ambulance siren appears to change tone as it
speeds by. When the ambulance moves toward us, its sound is
compressed to a shorter wavelength, resulting in a higher tone. As
it moves away, its sound is stretched to a longer wavelength,
resulting in a lower tone. Motion toward Earth, away from the
solar surface, was detected as a shortening of the wavelength, and
identified as the beginning of the solar wind.

"The identification of the detailed structure of the source

region of the fast solar wind is an important step in solving the
solar wind acceleration problem. We can now focus our attention on
the plasma (hot electrified gas) conditions and the dynamical
processes seen in the corners of the magnetic field structures,"
said Dr. Klaus Wilhelm of the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie in
Lindau, Germany, also co-author of the SCIENCE paper.

SOHO operates at a special vantage point about one million

miles out in space between the Sun and Earth. SOHO, launched in
1995, is a project of international collaboration between the
European Space Agency and NASA, and is operated from NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

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NOTE TO EDITORS: an image to support this story is available on the

Internet at:

FTP://PAO.GSFC.NASA.GOV/newsmedia/SOHO/SW