NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has uncovered hidden order in space turbulence, a finding that could help scientists understand magnetic storms on Earth.
Smoke rising from an incense stick can begin as a thin, steady stream before curling and spreading unpredictably. The smoke makes turbulence in the air visible. Turbulence also occurs in space, where the moving material is plasma, an ionized gas containing electrically charged particles. Electric and magnetic fields strongly influence how those particles move, making this turbulence different from the movements of ordinary air.
Space plasma is also so dilute that its particles rarely collide, making it effectively collisionless. Physicists are still working to understand how turbulence develops under these conditions and how its energy is distributed. Measurements from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have now revealed an organized pattern within that irregular activity.
Magnetic fields reverse rotation at smaller scales
At large scales, plasma behaves like a fluid, and turbulence develops through swirling motions called vortices and through electromagnetic waves. The fluctuations become random. At smaller scales, the dynamics of individual particles become important. These are different ways the same material behaves depending on the size of the disturbances being examined.
Using high-precision magnetic field and particle data from Parker Solar Probe, an international research team directly demonstrated, for the first time, that turbulent magnetic fields reverse their preferred direction of rotation across this transition. Picture the magnetic field’s direction as an arrow that can turn as the field fluctuates. Viewed looking radially away from the Sun, the fields preferentially rotate counterclockwise at larger scales. At smaller scales, they rotate clockwise.
The reversal occurs at the wavelength, or spatial scale, where fluid-like behavior gives way to particle-like dynamics. Farther from the Sun, the reversal becomes more pronounced and shifts toward longer wavelengths, corresponding to larger spatial scales.
“We see a clear structure in the spectrum, even though the turbulence represents unstructured motions,” says Dr. Masatomi Iizawa of Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig), the article’s first author.
The study brought together researchers from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at TU Braunschweig and the University of Tokyo, in cooperation with Tohoku University, Kyushu University, Osaka University, and other research institutes. The collaboration spanned ten countries, and the results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Turbulence shapes space weather
Dr. Yokoi of the University of Tokyo says, “The results are of great significance for both plasma physics and astrophysics.”
Plasma turbulence plays an important role in the solar wind, solar eruptions, and interplanetary space, as well as in Earth’s magnetosphere, the region dominated by our planet’s magnetic field. It also matters in accretion disks, where material orbits and moves inward toward a central object. In interplanetary space, turbulence can influence the shock waves and magnetic clouds produced by solar eruptions, making it an important factor in predicting geomagnetic storms.
Reference: “Nonlocal Evolution of Magnetic Helicity across the Magnetohydrodynamic–Kinetic Interface” by Masatomi Iizawa, Yasuhito Narita, Tommaso Alberti, Stuart D. Bale, Axel Brandenburg, Abraham C.-L. Chian, Horia Comişel, Shuichi Matsukiyo and Nobumitsu Yokoi, 13 October 2026, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aea84b
This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—535057280 and also by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research JP23K25895 and JP26K00767.
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