The Parker Solar Probe just found massive electric fields in the Sun’s atmosphere that are kicking the solar wind into overdrive.
March 18, 2026
Original Paper
Measurements on the kinetic origin of streamer dynamics
arXiv · 2603.15930
The Takeaway
For decades, we thought we understood how the solar wind escapes the Sun, but these 'in-situ' measurements found electric fields reaching 400 mV/m. This discovery challenges the standard model of solar physics and shows the Sun's outer atmosphere is far more electrically active than anyone realized.
From the abstract
A fundamental problem of solar physics is understanding the transition from the closed-loop magnetic environment of the corona to the open, radial structure of the heliospheric current sheet. While the large-scale heliospheric dynamics are in the MHD regime, the outer corona physics must involve non-MHD processes, none of which have been directly resolved in-situ until now. To approach this problem, 15 streamer structures observed by the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) during Orbits 16 through 23, at r