Like a rope breaking strand by strand, solar flares kink and break when too much current flows through them, triggering massive blasts of X-rays
“Corona loops are arches of plasma that protrude from the surface of the sun, aligned along magnetic field lines. The magnetic field lines act like highways for charged particles, guiding the motion of the electrons and ions that comprise plasma. The loops, which may project 100,000 kilometers above the sun's surface, can persist for minutes to hours. The loops usually grow and evolve slowly but sometimes can abruptly blast a tremendous amount of energy—billions of times stronger than the most powerful nuclear explosion on Earth—into space. This sudden blast of energy is called a solar flare.
Some of the energy in the flare takes the form of charged particles and "hard X-rays," which are high-energy electromagnetic waves like those used to image bones in a doctor's office. The Earth's own magnetic field and atmosphere act as a shield that protects life on the surface from getting cooked by these torrents of energy, but they have been known to disrupt communications and power grids. They also pose an ongoing threat to spacecraft and astronauts in space.
While the fact that solar flares generate energetic particles and X-ray bursts has long been known, scientists are only starting to piece together the mechanism by which they do so.”
“Among the recent discoveries are that solar corona loops do not appear to be a single structure, but rather are composed of fractally braided strands akin to a large rope.
"If you dissect a piece of rope, you see that it's made up of braids of individual strands," says Yang Zhang, graduate student and lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper. "Pull those individual strands apart, and you'll see that they're braids of even smaller strands, and so on. Plasma loops appear to work the same way."”
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