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Snapping the Sun's Grand Magnetic Border at 0.3 AU
Out in the solar system, there is a giant rippling curtain of charged particles that is actually the largest structure in our solar system. Known as the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), it marks the spot where the sun flips its magnetic north and south poles, and grows directly out of giant, glowing loops of plasma on its surface called helmet streamers. However, so far, studies of it have only occurred near Earth, using space-based instruments such as SoHo and Wind. But now, a new paper from Keiichi Ogasawara of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and his team used the joint ESA/NASA mission Solar Orbiter to capture the HCS at only about ⅓ the distance to Earth - before interactions with interstellar space and the solar wind change it. In other words, this paper represents the clearest ever picture of what the solar system’s largest coherent structure is actually made out of.
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