Coronal loops, well-defined hot strands of plasma that arch out into the sun’s atmosphere, are iconic to the sun’s imagery. But many of the supposed coronal loops we see might not be there at all.
Some coronal loops might be an illusion created by “wrinkles” of greater density in a curtain of plasma dubbed the coronal veil, researchers propose March 2 in Astrophysical Journal. If true, the finding, sparked by unexpected plasma structures seen in computer simulations of the sun’s atmosphere, may change how scientists go about measuring some properties of our star.
“It’s kind of inspiring to see these detailed structures,” says Markus Aschwanden, an astrophysicist at Lockheed Martin’s Solar & Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., who was not involved in the study. “They are so different than what we anticipated.”
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