SOLAR ACTIVITY: No sunspots? No problem. Even without those planet-sized islands of explosive magnetism, the sun is putting on a nice show. This polar crown prominence, a towering wall of plasma about 50,000 km high, was photographed yesterday by Jerome Grenier using a backyard solar telescope in Paris, France. Grenier's half-hour movie shows a phenomenon sometimes called "plasma falls." Narrow streams of plasma at the top of the prominence are constantly falling back to the bottom. Mysteriously, the streams plummet faster than ambient magnetic forces seem to allow. Nuclear engineers would like to figure out how this happens, because it also happens on a smaller scale in fusion reactors on Earth, frustrating their efforts to sustain an energy-producing reaction. Maybe prominences hold the key to the problem.
Posted: 7:37:54 AM
|