How do solar flares form? A Chinese team fires up lasers in a lab to find out
- Scientists recreate the way the sun’s magnetic fields collide and realign to send charged particles into space
- The work in the lab mimics powerful, puzzling processes previously seen by telescopes
The team simulated a chaotic phenomenon known as turbulent magnetic reconnection in which the sun’s magnetic fields dramatically collide, break, and realign, unleashing an enormous amount of radiation into space.
The results were published in the peer-reviewed international journal Nature Physics on Monday.
“We reproduced the rather chaotic and complex reconnection process in the laboratory, and demonstrated typical changes during solar flares which had been observed by telescope missions,” Beijing Normal University astronomy professor Zhong Jiayong, the study’s lead author, said.
“Compared with telescope observation, laboratory simulation is often more controllable and time-saving. It allows scientists to build more reliable models and better predict when and where magnetic reconnection is going to happen.”
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