The sun is pretty much a big nuclear reactor. A solar storm is when wisps of that material go outside of the sun that is highly charged with electromagnetic energy so it screws up our electronics. When the earth’s magnetic poles switch there will be a period of time where the earth’s magnetic field doesn't protect us from those charged particles and all of our electronic technology will be frie...

It has been nearly half a century since optical pumping techniques pioneered by Kastler1, Dehmelt2, and Bell and Bloom3,4 have been applied to sensitive measurements of magnetic fi elds5,6. Th e general idea of the method is that light that is near-resonant with an optical transition creates long-lived orientation and/or higher-order moments in the atomic ground state, which subsequently underg...

NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (SPP) mission will make the first in situ measurements of the solar corona and the birthplace of the solar wind. The FIELDS instrument suite on SPP will make direct measurements of electric and magnetic fields, the properties of in situ plasma waves, electron density and temperature profiles, and interplanetary radio emissions, amongst other things. Here, we describe the...

A new application of wavelet analysis is presented that utilizes the inherent phase information residing within the complex Morlet transform. The technique is applied to a weak solar magnetic network region, and the temporal variation of phase difference between TRACE 1700 8 and SOHO/SUMER C ii 1037 8 intensities is shown. We present, for the first time in an astrophysical setting, the applicat...

We investigate the formation of polarization profiles induced by a magnetic field in the He I multiplet at 10830 Å. Our analysis considers the Zeeman splitting in the incomplete Paschen-Back regime. The effects turn out to be important and produce measurable signatures on the profiles, even for fields significantly weaker than the level-crossing field (∼400 G). When compared to profiles calcula...

An attractive diagnostic tool for investigating the magnetism of the solar chromosphere is the observation and theoretical modeling of the Hanle and Zeeman effects in spicules, as shown in this letter for the first time. Here we report on spectropolarimetric observations of solar chromospheric spicules in the He i 10830 Å multiplet and on their theoretical modeling accounting for radiative tran...

We present a model for the spontaneous onset of fast magnetic reconnection in a weakly collisional plasma, such as the solar corona. When a current layer of macroscopic width undergoes collisional (Sweet-Parker) reconnection, a narrow dissipation region forms around the X-line. This dissipation region naturally becomes narrower during the reconnection process as stronger magnetic fields are con...

The upper atmosphere of the Sun is governed by the complex structure of the magnetic field. This controls the heating of the coronal plasma to over a million kelvin. Numerical experiments in the form of three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations are used to investigate the intimate interaction between magnetic field and plasma. These models allow one to synthesize the coronal emission ju...

We use limb synoptic plots to study long-lived features of the lower solar corona. The most persistent features are the polar sinusoids, which are generated by streamers associated with active regions. We Ðnd that the lifetimes of these structures (up to about 10 solar rotations) are much longer than the lifetimes of individual sunspots (typically less than one solar rotation). The long lifetim...

We review some longstanding scientific mysteries related to solar magnetism, with final attention to the mystery of the “turbulent diffusion” essential for the theoretical αω-dynamo that is believed to be the source of the magnetic fields of the Sun. Fundamental difficulties with the concept of turbulent diffusion of magnetic fields suggest that the solar dynamo problem needs to be reformulated...