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CORONAL CAVITIES - Remember the Spheres Coming off the Sun? Along with Solar Prominences, They May be an Advanced CME Warning System
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Orbiting Solar Fleet Peers Into Coronal Cavities
The sun's atmosphere dances. Giant columns of solar material - made of gas so hot that many of the electrons have been scorched off the atoms, turning it into a form of magnetized matter we call plasma - leap off the sun's surface, jumping and twisting. Sometimes these prominences of solar material, shoot off, escaping completely into space, other times they fall back down under their own weight.
The prominences are sometimes also the inner structure of a larger formation, appearing from the side almost as the filament inside a large light bulb. The bright structure around and above that light bulb is called a streamer, and the inside "empty" area is called a coronal prominence cavity.
...they [coronal prominence cavities] are an important one as they can be the starting point of what's called a coronal mass ejection, or CME.
[link to www.youtube.com]
..."When you see such a crisp clean shape like this, it's not an accident. That shape is telling you something about the physics of the magnetic fields creating it, and understanding those magnetic fields can also help us understand what's at the heart of CMEs."
...The cavity itself looked like a tunnel in a crescent shape, not unlike a hollow croissant.
Magnetic fields loop through the croissant in giant circles to support the shape, the way a slinky might look if it were narrower on the ends and tall in the middle - the entire thing draped in a sheath of thick plasma. The paper describing this three-dimensional morphology appeared in The Astrophysical Journal on Dec. 1, 2010.
[link to www.spacedaily.com] [link to www.nasa.gov]
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