breakout model tagged posts

A long filament erupted on the sun on Aug. 31, 2012, shown here in imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO

From long, tapered jets to massive explosions of solar material and energy, eruptions on the sun come in many shapes and sizes. Since they erupt at such vastly different scales, jets and the massive clouds – called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs – were previously thought to be driven by different processes. Scientists from Durham University, UK and NASA now propose that a universal mechanism can explain the whole spectrum of solar eruptions...