Scientists have found the source of the Sun’s magnetic field. It turns out it’s not where we thought

Recent months and years automatically direct our attention to the Sun. Approaching maximum solar activity, or perhaps even ongoing, negatively affects us. Just a few weeks ago, we observed the most powerful auroras in five hundred years, and almost every day there are flares and mass coronal ejections on the surface of our present star, disrupting satellites, power grids, radio communications, and much more.

When it comes to flares and coronal mass ejections, the Sun’s mysterious magnetic field remains the center of attention. Scientists have been constantly trying to discover its source for many years. But now it turns out they may have been looking in the wrong place.

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As in the case of the Earth’s magnetic field, which is generated in the core of our planet, scientists also suspect that the source of the magnetic field is a dynamo located somewhere deep within the Sun.

However, very complex computer simulations show that the source of the magnetic field observed on the Sun’s surface is much closer to the surface than previously thought.

A team of scientists has provenThey arise from plasma instability in the last third of the Sun’s radius. However, it should be noted that the diameter of the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers, so everything indicates that the source of the magnetic field is no more than 200 thousand kilometers deep under the surface of our star, in the so-called solar convection zone.

The whole problem in understanding the Sun’s magnetic field stems from its complexity. The goal of the 3D computer simulations of the magnetic field inside the Sun was to create a map of the plasma flow inside our star, but all the results were still too simplistic. Unfortunately, the simulations require millions of hours of work, even on supercomputers, yet they still result in a magnetic field that is less difficult to predict than that actually observed on the Sun.

Read also: Half a billion years ago, something happened to the Earth’s magnetic field. This led to a sudden change

For this reason, scientists decided to approach the topic from a different angle. By analyzing the shocks that appear on the surface of the Sun using what is called solar seismology, scientists decided to determine the internal shape of the star. The model created on this basis clearly shows that changes in plasma flow occur only in the upper 5-10 percent. Half the diameter of the sun. Such a model better reproduces the magnetic field actually observed at the surface of the Sun. However, interestingly, when the researchers tried to add to this data any influence of activity occurring in the deeper layers of the Sun, the effectiveness of the models in reproducing the observations declined rapidly.

It is worth noting here that improving a model capable of reproducing changes in the magnetic field on the Sun’s surface may allow future scientists to better understand and better predict activity on the Sun’s surface, associated flares, and coronal mass ejections, and thus the resulting outcomes. Solar storms around the Earth.