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NASA
Mighty Streams of Plasma Flow under Solar Surface
News story originally written on September 3, 1997
With the help of the SOHO spacecraft, scientists have made an exciting discovery about the Sun. SOHO stands for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
The discovery is that there are streams of plasma flowing under the surface of the Sun. Plasma is really hot gas. These plasma streams are the smallest things found inside the Sun, but each stream is still big enough to hold two Earths!
These streams affect "weather" or activity. Activity on the Sun like solar flares affects the Earth. This activity can cause power outages and communications failures on Earth.
For the last year, the SOHO spacecraft has been a solar observatory. It is 930,000 miles away from the Earth and has 12 scientific instruments.
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