New Kind Of Magnetic Explosion On The Sun – Observed By SDO

But before it could make it, the prominence ran into a snarl of magnetic field lines, sparking a magnetic explosion.

This important observation confirms a decade-old theory, and at the same time helps understand a key mystery about the Sun’s atmosphere.”This was the first observation of an external driver of magnetic reconnection,” Abhishek Srivastava, a solar scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), in Varanasi, India, said in a press release.

“This could be very useful for understanding other systems.  For example, Earth’s and planetary magnetospheres, other magnetized plasma sources, including experiments at laboratory scales where plasma is highly diffusive and very hard to control.”

The new explosion-driven type—called forced reconnection—had never been seen directly, though it was first theorized 15 years ago.

The scientists were able to study this plasma using observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, looking specifically at a wavelength of light showing particles heated 1-2 million kelvins (1.8-3.6 million F). The observations allowed them to directly see the forced reconnection event for the first time in the solar corona—the Sun’s uppermost atmospheric layer.

In a series of images taken over an hour, prominence in the corona could be seen falling back into the photosphere.

Spontaneous reconnection (observed earlier on the sun and around Earth) offers one explanation for how hot the solar atmosphere is—mysteriously, the corona is millions of degrees hotter than lower atmospheric layers, a conundrum that has led solar scientists for decades to search for what mechanism is driving that heat.

The new observations have just been published in the Astrophysical Journal.