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Astronomers using Japan's Hinode spacecraft have discovered that the sun is bristling with powerful "X-ray jets." They spray out of the sun's surface hundreds of times a day, launching blobs of hot gas as wide as North America at a top speed of two million miles per hour. These jets add significant mass to the solar wind and they may help explain a long-standing mystery of astrophysics: the superheating of the sun's corona."This is awesome and very much unexpected, " says Jonathan Cirtain of the Marshall Space Flight Center who was a key figure in the discovery.He recalls how it happened:"We found them a year ago in Nov. 2006. Hinode had just been launched and its instruments were coming online."To calibrate the spacecraft's X-ray Telescope, mission controllers in Japan pointed the telescope at a dark hole in the sun's atmosphere-a "coronal hole."Cirtain analyzed the data and "there they were!""After the shock wore off, I ran around dragging other scientists into my office to show them the movie." He likens the appearance of the jets erupting within a coronal hole to "the twinkle of Christmas lights, randomly oriented. It's very pretty."Cirtain notes that X-ray jets have been seen before, but never in such abundance.The first jets were recorded by a 1st-generation X-ray telescope onboard Skylab in the 1970s.They were called x-ray jets for the simple reason that they were bright at x-ray wavelengths.The phenomenon was later confirmed by a Naval Research Lab ultraviolet telescope that flew aboard the space shuttle in the 1980s as well as by Japan's Yohkoh X-ray Telescope in the 1990s. "All those instruments saw very few jets-typically one or two per day," says Cirtain. X-ray jets were thus regarded as a curiosity of little importance...To read more go to:
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