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A tale of a solar storm

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saturday

The interior of the sun is threaded with huge ropes and tubes of magnetic fields, loaded with very hot plasma—gas so hot its atoms are losing their electrons.

As the sun rotates and material flows up and down inside it, loops can develop in those magnetic ropes, causing them to rise to the surface (the photosphere), where they erupt as huge loops.

This is the story of one of them.

The solar surface is dotted with patches of enhanced magnetic fields, called active regions. These contain sunspots and constantly changing patterns of magnetic activity. It is in those that most of the dramatic phenomena take place.

A new loop has emerged, erupting through the surface and rising high into the million-degree but rarefied corona, where it becomes visible to our satellites and ground-based instruments.

It is large enough to contain hundreds of planets like ours, and still growing. Its feet are firmly anchored in the photosphere, where the constant motion and the emergence,........

© Castanet