magnetic reconnection tagged posts

Release of magnetic energy near the sun’s surface enables the solar wind to reach gravity-defying speeds. In a paper published June 7, 2023 in the journal Nature, a team of researchers used data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to explain how the solar wind is capable of surpassing speeds of 1 million miles per hour. They discovered that the energy released from the magnetic field near the sun’s surface is powerful enough to drive the fast solar wind, which is made up of ionized particles — called plasma — that flow outward from the sun.

James Drake, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Physics and Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST), co-led this research alongside firs...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) has flown close enough to the sun to detect the fine structure of the solar wind close to where it is generated at the sun’s surface, revealing details that are lost as the wind exits the corona as a uniform blast of charged particles.

It’s like seeing jets of water emanating from a showerhead through the blast of water hitting you in the face.

In a paper to be published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Stuart D...

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Gou Yanyu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) found that the solar outburst structure undergoes a complex reconfiguration evolution during the early outbursts. This is an important advancement in the study of solar outburst activity. This study was published in Nature Astronomy.

In classical images, the core structure of a solar eruption is a magnetic rope consisting of spirally wound magnetic lines. When the eruption begins, the magnetic ropes around the core are transformed by magnetic reconnection into spirally wound magnetic lines, which wrap around the original core, leading to its rapid growth in a “snowball” fashion...

Quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs; also known as quasi-periodic oscillations, i.e., QPOs) are electromagnetic emission phenomena that vary quasi-periodically with time. They appear in celestial transient events with different temporal/spatial scales, such as stellar flares, gamma ray bursts and fast radio bursts.

The sun, an ordinary star closest to us, is a place where flares with QPPs appear frequently...