And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day... Genesis 1:16
"According to the current understanding, coronal rain only forms on closed loops, where the plasma can gather and cool without any means of escape.
But as Mason sifted through the data, she found cases where rain was forming on open magnetic field lines. Anchored to the Sun at only one end, the other end of these open field lines fed out into space, and plasma there could escape into the solar wind. To explain the anomaly, Mason and the team developed an alternative explanation—one that connected rain on these tiny magnetic structures to the origins of the slow solar wind.
In the new explanation, the raining plasma begins its journey on a closed loop, but switches—through a process known as magnetic reconnection—to an open one.
The phenomenon happens frequently on the Sun, when a closed loop bumps into an open field line and the system rewires itself. Suddenly, the superheated plasma on the closed loop finds itself on an open field line, like a train that has switched tracks.
Some of that plasma will
--rapidly expand,
--cool down, and
--fall back to the Sun as coronal rain.
*But other parts of it will escape—forming, they suspect, one part of the slow solar wind."
Phys.Org
"According to the current understanding, coronal rain only forms on closed loops, where the plasma can gather and cool without any means of escape.
But as Mason sifted through the data, she found cases where rain was forming on open magnetic field lines. Anchored to the Sun at only one end, the other end of these open field lines fed out into space, and plasma there could escape into the solar wind. To explain the anomaly, Mason and the team developed an alternative explanation—one that connected rain on these tiny magnetic structures to the origins of the slow solar wind.
In the new explanation, the raining plasma begins its journey on a closed loop, but switches—through a process known as magnetic reconnection—to an open one.
The phenomenon happens frequently on the Sun, when a closed loop bumps into an open field line and the system rewires itself. Suddenly, the superheated plasma on the closed loop finds itself on an open field line, like a train that has switched tracks.
Some of that plasma will
--rapidly expand,
--cool down, and
--fall back to the Sun as coronal rain.
*But other parts of it will escape—forming, they suspect, one part of the slow solar wind."
Phys.Org