The Sun is the closest star to us in the entire Universe, but there is still a lot of mystery about it.
The astronomer Angelo Secchi first observed narrow, towering fingers of material stretching away from the Sun over 150 years ago. spicules can grow to a height of 12,000 kilometers, nearly the diameter of the Earth, but are usually only 1/6th that wide. They grow in a matter of minutes, shooting upwards at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, then collapsing back down.
There are millions of spicules on the Sun, and they look like grass or shag carpeting. The time-lapse video of them is beautiful.
They are known to be associated with strong magnetic fields, but it is not clear what causes them. Over the years, paper after paper has been published, with varying degrees of success in explaining these weird features.
A few years ago, a study showed that the magnetic field interacts with neutral and charged particles on the Sun's surface. A different team of solar astronomer wondered if there was a more fundamental piece of physics going on with them. There is a good video of fluids dancing when sound waves from a speaker are used. When the surface of a fluid is vibrated, you can get neat patterns in it as waves are pumped up by them, but as the frequency gets higher, it's a critical Frequency when the surface starts to create jets of water shooting up. This type of motion is called a ferrint wave. The top of the jet falls back to the surface when it breaks off in water or other liquids.
This type of event is common in nature, and in this video you can see that alligators use a low-frequency mating call that can cause it to happen in the water around them.
The Sun's surface is made of mostly hydrogen that is so hot the atoms have lost an electron, and is dense enough to act like a fluid. There are many sources of noise in the solar surface. There is a layer of hot material deep inside the Sun that cools when it gets to the surface. There are many towering convective conveyor belts transporting material up and down in the Sun. The rumble on the surface could be caused by the waves of the ferris wheel.
The new research shows that the physics of waves in the sun and in fluid are 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- They used various fluids in the lab to see if they could mimic spicules. When placed over a speaker, a mixture of apolymer can create jets that are very similar to spicules, and whenDiluted at the right amount, the droplets creation is suppressed as well. The math is similar to describe both effects, so there could be some physical similarities.
They turned to software that mimicked the behavior of the sun. The code can be adjusted to see if certain behaviors can be reproduced. The code reproduced spicule-like structures without any real detailed inputs. That is encouraging! They found that the sound waves of evenly divisible frequencies can be quasi-periodic, but with some randomness thrown in. The Sun's surface is a lot of different frequencies that don't always create harmony.
When they added a simple vertical magnetic field to their code, they got even more spicule-like behavior, with about the right heights and widths. The speed of growth was the same. A non-symmetric nature to the surface of the magnetic field helps squeeze the plasma into narrow towers. This is similar to the need for the polymeric fluid to be changed, that is anisotropy that helps the jets form.
They found a more fundamental reason for spicules to be produced on the Sun. This doesn't mean that earlier research was wrong, but it can be nice to look at more basic physics and see what it contributes to.
It is difficult to know if this is the right answer. The experiments and code look like spicules, but that's not what's going on.
This is the nature of science. It can take a while to weed out which ideas are actually involved and which aren't. A lot of the behavior of the Sun is difficult to comprehend. The Inouye Solar Telescope can see the Sun in high resolution and at a wavelength of light that our eyes can't see.
We will understand the Sun better as time goes on. That is how science works.
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