https://www.sciencealert.com/we-thought ... t-be-wrong"I have spent my entire career studying coronal loops," says astrophysicist Anna Malanushenko of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
"I never expected this. When I saw the results, my mind exploded."
Coronal loops are fascinating and beautiful: long, closed arcs of glowing plasma, sometimes associated with sunspots. But, although scientists have been analyzing them to better understand the Sun for decades, a few of their properties don't match what we might expect.
Firstly, coronal loops associated with sunspots tend to be much taller than calculations suggest they should be.
Secondly, the loops don't become less bright with height. Think of iron filings sprinkled near a bar magnet, self-arranging in loops. The bigger loops that reach farther from the magnet are thinner and more tenuous.
Malanushenko and her team conducted models of the solar corona using a software program called MURaM, which generates realistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Sun. Recently, this was updated to include the solar corona, which made it an excellent tool for trying to better understand coronal loops.
When the team ran their simulations, however, they found that the loops were not always discrete structures at all, but folds in optically thin sheets of plasma. Because these wrinkles are thicker and more dense, we can see them clearly.
Malanushenko and her team conducted models of the solar corona using a software program called MURaM, which generates realistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Sun. Recently, this was updated to include the solar corona, which made it an excellent tool for trying to better understand coronal loops.
When the team ran their simulations, however, they found that the loops were not always discrete structures at all, but folds in optically thin sheets of plasma. Because these wrinkles are thicker and more dense, we can see them clearly.
However, the simulation also revealed that coronal loops can exist on their own, too. This suggests that the solar corona is a much more complex environment than we knew.
"This study reminds us as scientists that we must always question our assumptions and that sometimes our intuition can work against us," Malanushenko says.
"This study demonstrates that the way we currently interpret the observations of the Sun may not be adequate for us to truly understand the physics of our star," Malanushenko says.
"This is an entirely new paradigm of understanding the Sun's atmosphere."
The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Nowhere in the article was anything related to electricity or electromagnetism.
Still better than all that multidimensional mumbo jumbo analytics.