Solar flares are powered by twisted magnetic fields that snap and release obscene amounts of energy. What scientists are just figuring out now is what sparks that snap. They started to learn a little bit more about the origins of this breakage thanks to a perfectly timed observation by the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter on September 30, 2024. This was when researchers finally caught a major solar flare in the act of being born.
Using the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, scientists zoomed in on a dark, arcing filament of plasma threaded with tightly wound magnetic fields. Roughly 40 minutes before the flare peaked, the region started filling with newly formed magnetic strands, which appeared every couple of seconds. Each strand was tightly twisted and coiled, barely visible.
Field lines would break and snap back together in a process called reconnection events, triggering larger events that would spread rapidly across the region. Instability would grow, the area would brighten, and energy release would accelerate. Eventually, the filament broke loose on one side and launched into space, violently unwinding at speeds that climbed from 155 to nearly 250 miles per second, all while bright sparks marked multiple reconnection sites that fired almost simultaneously along the filament’s length.
It was a spectacular sight to behold, one that you can see yourself in the footage the ESA released to the public:
Scientists Filmed the Birth of a Solar Flare for the First Time
All the data combined to clue scientists into what was going on: large solar flares aren’t driven by a single massive pop, but by many smaller events cascading together into something spectacularly explosive.
Of course, as the Law of Conservation of energy says, energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another. That’s true here, too. The solar orbiter observed “plasma rain,” streams of glowing blobs falling back through the sun’s atmosphere, and continuing even after the flare itself had faded. Those flows revealed how energy spreads through the solar atmosphere, leaving signs of turbulence long after the initial blast, with residual energy reverberating for a long time.
As we here on Earth are getting smacked by some of the most intense solar flares on record, we are simultaneously learning more about what causes them.
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