A powerful flare can zap satellites around the Earth, be a danger to orbiting astronauts, and even cause widespread power outages on Earth. While astronomers study these events because the physics is fascinating, that last bit puts a very real-world impact on them. The expanding bubble of subatomic particles and energy sweeps out into the solar system, and if it hits the Earth, it can connect with our own magnetic field, creating all kinds of havoc. Sometimes, this can trigger an even larger release of energy in the Sun’s outer atmosphere (the corona).
The resulting explosion dwarfs our planet’s entire nuclear arsenal and is what we call a solar flare. These loops carry a vast amount of energy with them, and normally carry that energy up the loop and back down into the Sun.īut if a bunch of these loops get tangled, they can interact and connect with each other, releasing their energy all at once. These blobs have their own internal magnetic field, and as they rise to the surface the huge loops of magnetic field lines (similar to what you see in bar magnet diagrams) pierce the surface. Inside the Sun there are enormous packets of hot plasma (gas with its electrons stripped off) that rise from deep within. The quick version of this is that the Sun has a very complicated magnetic field.
That’s a million times the yield of the entire nuclear weapon arsenal on Earth.Ī solar flare is, at its heart, a magnetic event associated with sunspots. And by intense, I mean it: A big flare can release as much as 10% of the Sun’s entire energy, but focused in a single spot. And it does it all in three dimensions.Ī solar flare is an intense explosion of energy just above the Sun’s surface. This is the first time a single model has been able to do this, combining all the necessary extremely (like, really really extremely) complicated physics involved together with the huge range of physical properties in the Sun over which a flare is generated. This is pretty amazing: Scientists have created a computer model that can simulate the conditions in the Sun that generate a solar flare.