Solar Orbiter catches the sun's missing high-speed vibrations

The sun's magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever-changing mess. In particular, our star's polar regions host areas called polar coronal holes, which contain invisible magnetic highways that stretch into interplanetary space. But there's a lot we don't know about how those highways actually work, particularly how they give the particles that form the fast solar wind an extra "kick" that sends them zooming at hundreds of kilometers per second.

≈