Braided magnetic flux ropes found at both human and light year scales

Investigating solar corona structures has led Paul Bellan, Caltech professor of applied physics, and his former graduate student Yang Zhang (Ph.D. '24) to discover a new equilibrium state of the magnetic field and its associated plasma. The solar corona, the outermost part of the sun's atmosphere, is much less dense than the sun's surface but is a million times hotter. The corona is composed of strong magnetic fields confining plasma, a gaseous soup of charged particles (electrons an...