We thought that the solar phenomenon was simple.
New simulations suggest that the loops of plasma we thought were coming out from the surface of the Sun may actually be in corrugated sheets of plasma.
Astronomers have dubbed this phenomenon the "coronal veil" and suggest that further research is needed to understand how and why they occur.
They say the finding is significant. Solar scientists have been using coronal loops to understand the properties of the Sun since they were first identified in the 1960s.
I have spent my entire career studying coronal loops, says Anna Malanushenko of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
I never expected this. My mind exploded when I saw the results.
There are coronal loops that are associated with sunspots. Although scientists have been analyzing them to better understand the Sun for decades, a few of their properties do not match what we might expect.
coronal loops associated with sunspots tend to be taller than calculations suggest.
The loops are not less bright with height. Think of iron filings sprinkled near a bar magnet. The bigger loops are more tenuous.
There is a sphere magnet. The Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 is owned byGeek3/Wikimedia Commons.
If the loops are associated with magnetic fields, they should show the same visual expansion as the iron loops.
The models of the solar corona were created using a software program called MURaM. This was updated recently to include the solar corona, which made it an excellent tool for trying to understand coronal loops.
The Transition Region and Coronal Explorer captured the loops. The NASA/LMSAL.
When the team ran their simulations, they found that the loops were not always single structures, but folds in thin sheets of plasma. We can see them clearly because they are thicker and denser.
The simulation showed that coronal loops can exist on their own. The solar corona is more complex than we thought.
This study reminds us that we must always question our assumptions and that sometimes our intuition can work against us.
The team's simulations captured the entire life cycle of a solar flare, and produced a three-dimensional datasets of the solar atmosphere that can be used to conduct synthetic observations. The loops and veils can be probed in more detail with this.
Understanding these structures from real solar observations can be difficult. The shape of the loop can be seen from the side, but not from the front.
There are some unanswered questions about the properties of coronal loops. How and why these structures form is an example. It is not clear how many of them are real loops. Some answers might be provided by synthetic observations.
If there are structures in the fluid that are difficult, if not impossible, to see, the results could have implications for other areas of plasma physics.
The way we currently interpret the Sun's observations may not be enough for us to truly understand the physics of our star.
This is a new paradigm of understanding the Sun's atmosphere.
The research has been published.
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