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Cake day: October 19th, 2024

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  • I hope someone who knows more about plasma dynamics can explain this better because it’s super fascinating.

    In eli5 terms (which is about as much as I understand), the sun’s core generates a massive magnetic field. Like way way bigger and stronger than the Earth’s, and just like the Earth’s it’s constantly shifting and wiggling around. The Sun is also really hot and made out of plasma. Because plasma is made out of charged particles, it tries to follow the magnetic fields and gets bent and thrown around into crazy arcs and patterns, as seen in the video.

    The darker spots on the sun (called sunspots) are areas where the magnetic field is exceptionally strong.

    Sometimes, the plasma gets thrown out into space at high velocities. If a plasma wave hits the Earth it can get caught in Earth’s magnetic field and cause auroras at the poles.

    Edit for extra infodump I forgot: Because plasma is electrically charged, it creates its own magnetic fields while it moves through space, so a plasma cloud is constantly reshaping itself in complex ways