Simulating Solar Flows

Beneath the Sun’s surface, a roiling layer of super-heated gas called plasma churns. Immense pressure and heat causes tightly packed atoms of helium, hydrogen, and trace metals to travel rapidly, almost like a liquid, through the Sun’s outer layers. To understand more about where this movement comes from and how it influences space weather and life on Earth, scientists use advanced computational models to simulate the Sun’s active interior. Since no supercomputer is powerful enough to simulate the Sun in its entirety, researchers reproduce the behavior of only a subsection of the Sun – sometimes just a few miles wide – to reveal small-scale systems that cannot be observed directly.

This visualization demonstrates how plasma rises to the surface, where it cools before sinking back into the Sun’s interior. As these ionized atoms come into contact with each other and interact with the Sun’s magnetic field, they twist and turn, creating columns of rotating plasma that influence magnetic field lines. Scientists assess the degree to which traveling solar plasma and magnetic fields twist and tangle using a measurement called helicity. Relative to the direction that a partical is traveling, helicity can be positive (twisting in the same direction as travel) or negative (twisting opposite to the direction of travel).