magnetic reconnection tagged posts

Jan Egedal, professor of physics at UW-Madison who lead an exploration of magnetic reconnection, stands beside a chamber used for experiments in that exotic phenomenon. Magnetic reconnection seems to be involved in some of the most violent explosions in the universe; the recent study was the clearest view of the magnetic reconnection ever measured in space. The results “blew my mind,” he says. Credit: David Tenenbaum/UW-Madison

Magnetic reconnection is a complicated phenomenon that Nuno Loureiro, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics at MIT, has been studying in detail for more than a decade. To explain the process, he gives a well-studied example: “If you watch a video of a solar flare” as it arches outward and then collapses back onto the sun’s surface, “that’s magnetic reconnection in action. It’s something that happens on the surface of the sun that leads to explosive releases of energy.” Loureiro’s understanding of this process of magnetic reconnection has provided the basis for the new analysis that can now explain some aspects of turbulence in plasmas. Credit: NASA

Artist’s conception of the complex magnetic field environment at Mars. Yellow lines represent magnetic field lines from the Sun carried by the solar wind, blue lines represent Martian surface magnetic fields, white sparks are reconnection activity, and red lines are reconnected magnetic fields that link the surface to space via the Martian magnetotail. Credit: Anil Rao/Univ. of Colorado/MAVEN/NASA GSFC

In this simulation, a reconnection even pushes a blob of plasma toward Earth. The jet blown in the opposite direction wobbles due to the unstable conditions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Yi-Hsin Liu/Joy Ng, producer