The Parker Solar Probe just found massive electric fields in the Sun’s atmosphere that are kicking the solar wind into overdrive.
arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 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