http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php ... &year=2008
Not a SINGLE mention of an electric current in the bunch. Are they that ignorant of how magnetism works? Or they just bowdlerizing it for the public?MAGNETIC RAIN: There's a rainstorm underway on the sun's eastern limb. You'd better bring your asbestos umbrella, though, because the "droplets" are Texas-sized blobs of hot plasma:
Animated GIF (pretty!)
"This is prominence finery at its best," says photographer Pete Lawrence of Selsey, UK. "Small bright points within the prominence that were seen on the capture screen have been recorded as blurs due to the rapid motion of material in just a few seconds!"
Prominences are clouds of hydrogen held above the surface of the sun by magnetic fields. While this particular cloud appears to be raining like a summer shower on Earth, the true situation is more complicated. Look carefully: Some of the plasma raindrops are falling "up." That's because the motions are controlled by not only gravity but also magnetism, a force of little importance in terrestrial rainstorms. The solar magnetic field is rooted below the sun's visible surface; roiling motions in the body of the sun itself cause magnetic fields high overhead to shift, wriggle, and "rain" in all directions. No wonder prominences are so much fun to watch.
Also, how exactly does a magnetic field "rain?" Shifting and wriggling are simply imprecise ways of saying the various vector fields get recalculated from one moment to the next. But, magnetic fields don't "rain."
Charged particles can follow magnetic field lines, in a process otherwise known as "field-aligned currents" (positive charges generally flow one way, and negative charges the other along an electric circuit; one might expect the same from prominences and flares, if both electrical species are involved).
Magnetic fields themselves do not "rain" insofar as I'm aware. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Perhaps they think magnetic fields are "frozen in" to the plasma, which Alfvén repeated emphatically was an incorrect concept he wished he'd never spawned (yet astronomers ate it up, embraced and extended it [not unlike Micro$oft sometimes does with technology it wants]).
Alfén
, to the contrary of "frozen in" field lines, specified that where we see magnetic fields in plasma, we MUST (no, it's not optional) consider the underlying electric currents that maintain the magnetic fields!Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin
I cracks me up... 