In the quest to understand how the world's weather moves around
the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of
atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can
move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate, localized
flows. Much the same must currently be done to understand the
various motions at work in the great space weather system that
links the sun and Earth as the sun shoots material out in all
directions, creating its own version of a particle sea to fill
up the solar system. "People think of the sun as giving out
light and heat," says Ruth Skoug, a space scientist at Los
Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. "But it is also
always losing particles, losing mass." For example, the sun
sends out a steady outflow of solar particles called the solar
wind and additionally giant, sudden explosions of material
called coronal mass ejections or CMEs erupt out into space.
Skoug studies a third kind of particle flow: jets of high-energy
electrons streaming from the su