Scientists have succeeded in recreating miniature solar flares in the laboratory. This has been reported by the California Institute of Technology.
The sun consists of hot plasma with a temperature of thousands of degrees. Its surface is unstable, and rings of ionized gas on it can swell regularly, and beams of plasma sometimes up to hundreds of thousands of kilometers long cause a flare. Solar flares can have an energy of 160 billion megatons and are a source of cosmic radiation that threatens humans outside Earth and low Earth orbit.
Paul Bellan and colleagues, now at the California Institute of Technology, analogue solar flares in the lab. To do this, physicists built a vacuum chamber with two electrodes inside, connected a giant capacitor to them, and filled it with enough energy to power a small city for a few microseconds. An arc about 20 cm long was then ignited between the electrodes, forming structures similar to the Sun’s plasma bundles. The loop took about 10 microseconds and the whole process was filmed on a camera with a frequency of 10 million frames per second.
As a result, it was possible to find that the loops in the solar corona do not represent a single structure, but consist of fractally woven threads, like fibers in a string. This structure is important for the production of high-energy particles and the production of X-ray flares. The structure is at risk when too much current tries to flow through the loop. A twist occurs in the loop and individual threads begin to break. Each newly broken thread then increases the load on the remaining ones. As a result, the loop gets longer and thinner until it breaks.
The authors recorded a negative voltage surge associated with an X-ray burst just as the filament broke. The electric field from this voltage spike accelerates the charged particles to very high energies, and when the particles then slow down, they emit X-rays.
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