Please forgive me if this has been posted already;

Data delivered by ESA’s Cluster quartet of satellites shows that it is easier for the solar wind to penetrate Earth’s magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, than had previously been thought.

Using Rumba, Salsa, Samba and Tango satellites as a space plasma microscope, scientists have zoomed in on the solar wind to reveal tiny turbulent swirls that could play a big role in heating it.

Also scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. have, for the first time, directly observed the presence of certain waves in the solar wind—called Kelvin-Helmholtz waves that can help transfer energy into near-Earth space—under circumstances when previous theories predicted they were not expected.

Turbulence is highly complex and all around us, evident in water flowing from a tap, around an aircraft wing, in experimental fusion reactors on Earth, and also in space.

In the stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun – the solar wind – turbulence is thought to play a key part in maintaining its heat as it streams away and races across the Solar System. As the solar wind expands, it cools down, but to a much smaller extent than would be expected if the flow were smooth.

Turbulence arises from irregularities in the flow of particles and magnetic field lines, but understanding how this energy is transferred from the large scales where it originates, to the small scales where it is dissipated, is like trying to trace energy as it is transferred from the smooth, laminar flow of a river down to the small turbulent eddies formed at the bottom of a waterfall.

Two of the four Cluster satellites have also made extremely detailed observations of plasma turbulence in the solar wind.

[link to www.messagetoeagle.com]