A Tiny Sun in a Jar Is Shedding Light on Solar Flares

Seth Putterman started out studying the behavior of plasma for national security reasons. Extremely fast hypersonic missiles heat and ionize the surrounding air and form a cloud of charged particles called plasma, which absorbs radio waves and makes it hard for operators on the ground to communicate with the missiles—a problem Putterman was trying to solve. Then it occurred to him: The same plasma physics apply to our sun.

The UCLA scientist and his colleagues have now created what Putterman calls “our sun in a jar,” a 1.2-inch glass ball filled with plasma, which they have used to model processes like those that create solar flares. These are explosive bursts of energy

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