In this visualization of a solar flare, violet represents plasma with temperatures less than 1 million Kelvin; red represents temperatures between 1 million and 10 million K; and green represents temperatures above 10 million K. (Image credit: Courtesy Mark Cheung, Lockheed Martin and Matthias Rempel, NCAR)
I really wish I could say something elegant and poetic, but it just really makes me want to say, “Rad!”
Same
More details about the simulation and visualization can be found in this 2019 post:
https://news.ucar.edu/132648/emergence-eruption
Excerpt from post:
A team of scientists has, for the first time, used a single, cohesive computer model to simulate the entire life cycle of a solar flare: from the buildup of energy thousands of kilometers below the solar surface, to the emergence of tangled magnetic field lines, to the explosive release of energy in a brilliant flash.
The accomplishment, detailed in the journal Nature Astronomy, sets the stage for future solar models to realistically simulate the Sun's own weather as it unfolds in real time, including the appearance of roiling sunspots, which sometimes produce flares and coronal mass ejections. These eruptions can have widespread impacts on Earth, from disrupting power grids and communications networks, to damaging satellites and endangering astronauts.
Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory led the research. The comprehensive new simulation captures the formation of a solar flare in a more realistic way than previous efforts, and it includes the spectrum of light emissions known to be associated with flares.
"This work allows us to provide an explanation for why flares look like the way they do, not just at a single wavelength, but in visible wavelengths, in ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, and in X-rays," said Mark Cheung, a staff physicist at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. "We are explaining the many colors of solar flares."
This simulation uses a wrap-around to simulate a continuous sphere, which makes sense. However it's not curved. That will change the dynamics of how it actually works. Unless of course it was in the sim and this visualisation (for some reason) has flattened it.
It's not intended to be a whole sphere, it's an active sunspot region which is a tiny fraction of the sun's surface. Seems they made it repeating just to avoid blank walls in the simulation.
This would have been sick to have on the old music players
ELI5 what is happening here?
Do you mean what causes a solar flare, or like how its being simulated?
How the reactions and forces work to create solar flare.
ELI5 version:
The Sun is basically a giant ball of super-hot, electrically charged gas. Because that gas is moving around constantly, it creates huge magnetic fields that twist, stretch, and tangle like rubber bands.
Sometimes those magnetic “rubber bands” get so tangled up that they snap and reconnect really fast. When that happens, a stupid amount of energy that was stored in the magnetic field gets released all at once.
That sudden energy release:
Superheats nearby plasma
Shoots out intense light, X-rays, and radiation
Can fling charged particles into space
That violent snap-and-release is what we call a solar flare.
The simulation isn’t modeling nuclear reactions or the Sun exploding or anything dramatic like that. It’s modeling:
How the magnetic fields move
How plasma flows around them
How energy builds up and then gets dumped when the field reconnects
So in short: Solar flares happen because the Sun’s magnetic fields get twisted up, freak out, snap, and dump a ton of energy in a cosmic tantrum.
Does gravity have any noticeable effect here or is it almost entirely magnetic forces?
The Sun farted plasma
Aah, fond memories of Plasma Pong.