Sun's magnetic arches may be just a projection artifact, research suggests | Hacker News Reader

Sun's magnetic arches may be just a projection artifact, research suggests

spacechatter.com

124 pointssamweb327 comments

The paper buried at the bottom of the article is recommended over the superficial article.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac3df9

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac3df9/...

I was balking at the term "optical illusion", and it turns out that the word "illusion" never even appears in the paper. The paper has a lot of excellent illustrations and simulation photos.

Ok, we've changed the title to be less illusory above.

Thanks for making the point and thanks to gus_massa for the suggested wording!

I'm surprised by this discovery too, I would have thought we would have been able to observe something like this with the STEREO spacecraft [0] which are pair of identical spacecraft that are imaging the sun at different angles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEREO

The linked paper at the bottom of the article might shed more light on this for you:

“We demonstrate how apparently isolated loops could deceive observers, even when observations from multiple viewing angles are available”

I haven’t read it all yet and this topic is totally out of my wheelhouse, but it seems quite interesting.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac3df9

I had never heard of this and took a look at the Wikipedia page you linked.

> Contact with STEREO-B was lost in 2014 after entering an uncontrolled spin preventing its solar panels from generating enough power, but STEREO-A is still operational.

Damn things went Mono.

I think this is akin to the illusion of ring nebulae, which are more like bubbles than actual rings. Because they are a gas explosion, their 3D exterior edges look thicker in 2D. So, if you are looking through a 3D cloudy sheet, it will look like a 2D “garden hose.”

In case anyone reading this works for Fortinet.. FYI, this domain is currently categorized as 'pornography'.

space porn is the best science porn

Jabba the Hutt

Solo! Come out of there, Solo!

I'm wondering how that happened. Is it based on image recognition?

I noticed the picture in this article on the front page, that could potentially be classified as something "suspicious" (could be considered NSFW)

https://www.spacechatter.com/2022/06/29/microgravity-worms-c...

> sometimes be optical illusions “created by folds or wrinkles in much larger ‘sheets’ of solar material that the authors call coronal veils.”

So we’re seeing a sheet of paper from the side?

More like if you take some cellophane and crinkle it up. The thicker parts block more light than the thinner parts, so if you look at the shadows, you'll see structures that aren't representative of the shape of the material.

I, for one, find the veil model just as cool and spectacular as the loops. I object to calling it "just an optical illusion"!

They’re not calling the veil model an optical illusion, they’re just saying that the loop like structures we think we see are deceptively limited side effects of some aspects of the veil structures. It’s the image that’s the illusion, because it misleads us about the reality.

Got it! Still I object to the "just" - this illusion makes it cooler :)

Nah, more like wrinkled gauze. In fact there is a photo of a beautifully low-tech model at the bottom: two styrofoam balls, one with a few loops of plastic thread stuck in it, one with a loop of a wrinkled, gauzy fabric. Both are casting a shadow on the wall; the gauzy fabric's shadow has a lot of subtleties of translucency that the thread doesn't, and does indeed look more like all the sun photos above it.

Flat sun

(The substantial introspection here is that modern flat earth fans believe that going into space and observing the earth results in an optical illusion)

so its going to be comical when other celestial bodies have that and it emboldens flat earth proponents

Am I the only one who finds the tube model weirder than the sheet/veil-like model? I know it's too easy to call findings out as "obvious" after the fact, but I guess I never even realized that the 3D volumetric structure needed this clarification.

At what point does something with an effect so powerful cease to be an illusion and become real?

Exactly what I was thinking. If the optical illusion looks the same from multiple different viewing angles, is it not then exactly what you see and not an illusion? Versus other illusions, once the perspective changes, the illusion is revealed. This shit is getting way meta.

This is sort of the argument in Science. In the public discourse you have these conversations about Science being Right or Wrong. Within Science, you have more of this notion of All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful.

We don't know if half of the things we know about physics are right or illusions. What we do know is that the models we have are consistent with the observations, and more importantly that they survive interaction. If I poke it, does the 'illusion' continue, or does it pop like a bubble?

Maybe magnetism doesn't work the way we think it does, but the way we think it works lets me cram millions of dancing lights onto a flat surface and organize them into pictures. And we got to millions of dancing lights from tens of thousands because we kept refining that model down and down into scenarios too small to see with the naked eye.

I've heard physicists talk about what's real as the set of concepts/objects that are required to describe and predict the world. So imaginary numbers are real (if you believe the qm wave function is real), infinities aren't (but are still very useful).

There are always alternative ways to describe the same phenomena. For example QM could be done with only real numbers (you can emulate imaginary numbers with matrix operations). There is no clear cut notion of what is "required".

Is light a wave or a particle?

Maybe that's different but my guess is the veil versus loop distinction gets fuzzy at some point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com