Researchers have made a significant discovery regarding the elusive nature of “solar wind” thanks to high-resolution data captured by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Findings published last week in the journal Science offer new insights into the mysterious, powerful streams of plasma that emanate from the Sun’s surface at hundreds of kilometers per second.

This solar wind phenomenon impacts everything from space weather, geomagnetic storms, and the auroras seen on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system to our galaxy at large.

The Solar Orbiter detected “picoflare” jets, or localized bursts of charged particles, near the Sun’s South Pole. The images it captured reveal dark streaks that fade after about 20 to 100 seconds.

Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, a solar physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and research team lead, said the exceptional “high-resolution, high-cadence images” made all the difference in their research.

“We observed a coronal hole using the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft,” the researchers explained. “We suggest that such picoflare jets could produce enough high-temperature plasma to sustain the solar wind and that the wind emerges from coronal holes as a highly intermittent outflow at small scales.”

The jets reach speeds of around 60 miles per second, occupying the “picoflare” range of kinetic energy. According to the scientists’ calculations, a single jet releases as much energy as around 3,000 to 4,000 households in the U.S. over the course of a full year.

The new study is poised to transform our understanding of solar phenomena and may have wide-ranging implications for space exploration, weather prediction, and even telecommunication infrastructure.