“Explosive bursts normally seen only on the surface of the sun can now be captured in a 13-foot-long tube using lab-created plasmas and bursts of laser light.
Physicists have created a scaled-down model of solar eruptions called coronal mass ejections, which can wreak havoc on satellites and create beautiful northern-light displays on Earth. The new experiments suggest these eruptions are set off when gushes of charged particles flow into twisted loops of magnetic field that extend from the sun’s upper atmosphere.
“You can do things in the lab that are absolutely impossible to do in space,” said plasma physicist Walter Gekelman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Gekelman and UCLA physicist Shreekrishna Tripathi created miniature versions of enormous loops of solar matter called arched magnetic flux ropes. Their results are described in the Aug. 13 issue of Physical Review Letters.
These twisted magnetic ropes — also sometimes called coronal loops, prominences and filaments — can sit comfortably on the sun’s surface for hours or days, transporting energy and matter from the solar surface to the outer atmosphere. But eventually they explode, shooting tons of charged particles out into space like a slingshot. These loopy time bombs have been photographed by observatories like the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory — but how they form, and what makes them collapse, is still unknown.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @UKgnome)
