Scientists have found the possible origins of the sun's magnetic field, and it's not where they thought it was.
"I think this result may be controversial," co-author Keaton Burns, a research scientist at MIT, said in a statement."Most of the community has been focused on finding dynamo action deep in the sun. Now we're showing there's a different mechanism that seems to be a better match to observations." Magnetic field lines cannot cross each other, so sometimes these fields knot into kinks before suddenly snapping — which in turn launches bursts of radiation called solar flares or enormous plumes of solar material called coronal mass ejections out into space. Once launched, CMEs travel at millions of miles per hour, sweeping up charged particles from the solar wind to form a giant, combined wavefront that, if pointed toward Earth, can trigger geomagnetic storms over our planet.
"Those simulations require millions of hours on national supercomputing facilities, but what they produce is still nowhere near as turbulent as the actual sun," Burns said.