Does Magnetic Twist Crank Up the Sun's Outbursts?

摘要

To solar physicists, the dense interior of the sun, its wispy corona, and the far reaches of space aren't as disparate as they look. They share a common thread: The sun's magnetic field, which is generated by a "dynamo" of churning plasmas in the sun's interior, erupts through its surface at sunspots and bright patches called faculae and is swept into space by the sun's thin wind ot plasma and by larger outbursts of material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). But researchers don't know exactly howthe magnetic field links all these phenomena. "There are lots of theories and models and suggestions about virtually all of those steps," says David McComas, a space physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, but "we're not yet sure how all the connections go."