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A Question about the active regions and magnetic fields of the sun?

There's a new video out showing the active CME regions where the magnetic fields are the strongest on the sun. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0_6kbeagIk&list=HL...

Is there any possibility that this CME/ Magnetic "ring" around the Sun is either responsible for or is somehow a product of the orbital path that the planets of our solar system follow?

I read today that there's "no scientific significance" to this view of the sun. I have a feeling they're way off with that statement. To me a ring around the sun may have a profound impact on our understanding of how gravity works.... but I'm not a scientist.

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  • 9 years ago
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    You seem somewhat misinformed about what you're looking at here. A CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) is an event, not something that exists on the sun in perpetuity. The "ring" you're noticing is just the tendency for the most activity on the sun to happen around certain latitudes. This latitude shifts over the course of the sun's 11 year cycle. Activity is more concentrated in latitudes closer to its equator when its most active, and it shifts to being more north/south of the equator during its less active periods. It has nothing to do with planetary orbits.

    The sun's magnetic fields are constantly shifting and distorting because it's a huge ball of plasma, which is ionized gas and thus influences magnetic fields. The sun rotates faster around the equator than it does at the poles, so this twists the magnetic fields around quite a bit.

  • 9 years ago

    basically the planets do not much contribute to whatever happens within the sun, cause their mass and distance is simply irrelevant in relation to the forces in action inside the sun.

    In order to understand the magnetic fields existing around a celestial body its necessary to figure that the magnetic field is caused by Ionized matter in motion and a kind of electrical current flowing within that matter. This current generates a magnetic field, which (in case of the earth) equals out to some extend to form a sort of magnetic bubble with a north and a south pole.

    On the sun there's some more action in progress. Gravitation tries to quench matter to the center, where it heats up, and tries to expand from that again due to heat.

    One could imagine that there are giant bubbles of matter with different temperatures in motion which grow and shrink, rise and sink. And wherever some motion of these bubbles happens the current which is generated flows this way, or that way, thus forming many different magnetic fields which often get totally distorted and expand in loops out of the suns surface.

    One can see those magnetic field-lines in imagery cause ionized matter tends to flow along the lines.

    these are those circles or loops in CME's

    So in general there's no such smooth bubble-like magnetic field as around earth, there's just a highly distorted disaster of field-lines which appear here and there, which are strong enough to effect motion of the matter inside too.

    In relation to the force of the magnetic field on earth its like comparing a Supertanker with a Bottle of oil from the gas-station.

    Gravitation, as your question implies is just a factor for the matter directly involved inside the sun, and since the sun combines like 99% of all matter within the solar system, the influence from planets orbiting the sun with their distances, is comparable to the force you apply to the rotation of the earth by hard breaking your car in your driveway.

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