Polymeric jets throw light on the origin and nature of the forest of solar spicules

Modelling the Sun’s surface in a bowl of liquid polymer

29 July 2022

Intriguing similarities between plasma jets emanating from the Sun’s surface and jets excited in a liquid polymer driven by a loud speaker could help shed light on the physics of the Sun.

At any given moment, about 3 million plasma spikes, or spicules, are shooting up from the solar surface to heights of between 4,000 and 12,000 kilometres. Various mechanisms have been proposed for them, but models based on them have failed to give good agreement with observations.

Now, a team that included researchers from Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom has explored a similar phenomenon in a much more accessible system — jets excited by a speaker placed under a container filled with a liquid polymer.

By performing computer simulations of the Sun and experiments in the lab, the researchers show how the similarities could indicate the same underlying physics in the two systems.

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References

1. Nature Physics 18, 595–600 (2022). doi: 10.1038/s41567-022-01522-1