Magnetic waves explain mystery of Sun's outer layer | Hacker News Reader

Magnetic waves explain mystery of Sun's outer layer

phys.org

41 pointsdnetesn4 comments

If anyone is interested in a more technical and in-depth review of energy release mechanism theories in the solar corona check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1AFnL6VARI "Solar Flares - How the sun relaxes" at the harvard and smithsonian center for astrophysics colloquium.

It goes into much more detail and explains much clearer the evidence for magnetohydrodynamic waves as the energy carrier and why it's probably not (exclusively or mostly) electron beams. tldr; doing the numbers, every single electron in the entire hemisphere of the corona above a flare site would have to beam down than return in order for it to work out. It's gotta be magnetohydrodynamic waves.

I think is Electromagnetic waves, not magnetic waves. They always come together. Or do I have to burn my fundamental physics book?

The term magnetic wave, in this article, refers to Alfven waves [1], a phenomenon arising with the movement of electrically conducting fluids, like the ions in our sun.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfvén_wave

Alfven himself was telling the astronomers not to ignore the electric fields. It is a gross oversimplification. And I think this keeps science back from understanding the sun as it really is.

If I may explain it a bit further:

We measure magnetic fields in sunspots. And they are pretty stable. They are measured via the Zeeman effect, and show complex very strong magnetic fields (0.1 Tesla and higher). These fields require gigantic electric currents to be sustained. ( I= M*R^2 , with extreme large radius I= +-10^10 Ampere)

According to the mainstream astronomers, the magnetic should point outward. And this means that the currents must go around the sunspots. And we do not see any of such surrounding currents, nor do we have any idea where they could be.

Magnetism near moving conductors causes eddy-currents, which reduce the magnetic fields. So moving neutral plasma can never be the driver of such magnetic fields.

Yet, there is a clear solution. The sunspots have lines of plasma moving outwards or inwards. And these plasma lines are able to conduct strong currents easily.

So instead of a vertical magnetic field, we have a horizontal magnetic field around the plasma currents. And these plasma currents are conducting large amount of electricity like lightning.

It is also in line with the behaviour of solar flares. Some flares behave like plasma rail guns. Which works exactly as I explained.

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