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Asked by scazza226 to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 15 Mar 2011 in Categories: Space.
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Sheila Kanani answered on 14 Mar 2011:
Great question, and so current too. Have you been watching the news? 🙂
A solar flare is a large explosion in the Sun’s atmosphere that can release as much as 6 × 10^25 joules of energy. Current theory suggests that a solar flare is formed because of something called magnetic reconnection. This is a really tough topic that a lot of scientists are investigating at the moment.
Magnetic reconnection is the name given to the rearrangement of magnetic field lines when two oppositely directed magnetic fields are squashed together and rearranged.
This is a picture of it:
This rearrangement is accompanied with a sudden release of energy stored in the original field lines. The sudden release of energy in this reconnection causes the solar flare.Imagine it to be like elastic bands being stretched so far that they snap. It hurts when they snap on your fingers, doesn’t it? That is due to the energy stored in the elastic band!
Solar flares happen a lot because there are areas on the Sun called active regions, where magnetic fields are much stronger on an average.
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Adam Tuff answered on 14 Mar 2011:
A solar flare is made from what’s known as a mass coronal ejection – in English, this means a big lot of hydrogen and helium, the stuff the sun is made of, is thrown off. The sun is a complicated system of magnetic fields – you’ll probably know what a bar magnet’s magnetic field looks like by scattering iron filings around one as they line up with the way the magnetic lines point. Because the sun is a constantly changing ball of gas, the magnetic fields move around. When two lines of opposite direction meet up, they reconnect, quite violently, and this forces material off the sun – the really fast moving particles are the ones that really cause a lot of problems for us as they can damage satellites!
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Robert Simpson answered on 15 Mar 2011:
The Sun is a very energetic place. Electrically charged particles swirl around the surface of the Sun and it has an intense magnetic field. The magnetic field of the Sun, unlike the Earth, twists and changes all the time. Sometimes the field gets all twisted around on a part of the Sun’s surface and the electrically charged material of the Sun is swept into massive arcs, as it follows the magnetism.
Eventually the magnetic field gets so twisted and distorted that it essentially snaps and like an elastic band, the energy that was stored in the magnetic field lines is released and it flings the material out into the Solar System. These massive ejections of material can reach out into the distant Solar System, as far as Saturn.
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Geoff McBride answered on 15 Mar 2011:
If you took a load of elastic bands and streatched them and then twisted them eventually one would go twang. Thing is what happens with the magnetic fields on the sun which also go twang throwing out hot plasma gas in the form of a solar flare.
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Suzie Sheehy answered on 15 Mar 2011:
A solar flare is an explosion in the sun that results in some material being thrown out from the surface. They can be really energetic & really exciting! You can see them as sunspots if you look through a solar filter.
Comments
scazza226 commented on :
thanks very interesting 😀