PhysOrg – Plasmas torn apart: Physicists make discovery that hints at origin of phenomena like solar flares
PhysOrg – Plasmas torn apart: Physicists make discovery that hints at origin of phenomena like solar flares
By Marcus Woo | 15 February 2012
January saw the biggest solar storm since 2005, generating some of the most dazzling northern lights in recent memory.
The source of that storm—and others like it—was the sun’s magnetic field, described by invisible field lines that protrude from and loop back into the burning ball of gas. Sometimes these field lines break—snapping like a rubber band pulled too tight—and join with other nearby lines, releasing energy that can then launch bursts of plasma known as solar flares. Huge chunks of plasma from the sun’s surface can zip toward Earth and damage orbiting satellites or bump them off their paths.
Magnetic reconnection on the sun often involves phenomena that span scales from a million meters to just a few meters. At the larger scales, the physics is relatively simple and straightforward. But at the smaller scales, the physics becomes more subtle and complex—and it is in this regime that magnetic reconnection takes place. Magnetic reconnection is also a key issue in developing thermonuclear fusion as a future energy source using plasmas in the laboratory. One of the key advances in this study, the researchers say, is being able to relate phenomena at large scales, such as the kink instability, to those at small scales, such as the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
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