The surface of the Sun is never still. Upon this burning ball of gas, a continual flow of super-hot plasma creates ropes of magnetic fields that can twist and tangle with one another.
As the star rotates, these invisible lines snap apart and join together again, bursting into flares, storms and eruptions of plasma.
This phenomenon, known as magnetic reconnection, has been seen many times before on the Sun and even around our own planet, but we’ve only captured spontaneous reconnections in the past.
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