An international team has found the first in situ evidence for the existance of a null point in the central area of magnetic reconnection. The discovery was reported in the July issue of Nature Physics. Magnetic reconnection, a process whereby the lines of a complex magnetic field break and reconnect to drastically alter its structure, is of fundemental importance to the studies of astrophysical, space and laboratory plasmas, says XIAO Chijie, first author of the Nature Physics article and an astrophysicist from the National Astronomical Obervatories at CAS (NAOC).
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