Acceleration of the fast solar wind by the emergence of new magnetic flux

Here is the fast solar wind, originating in tiny flare-like reconnection events in the lower solar atmosphere, where fields come and go with the flows. The hexagon would represent one network element, with its flow carrying field to the boundaries and especially the vertices. Recently this process has been called the "magnetic carpet," a superfluous new name for the kind of picture illustrated in the Archive's Dowdy cartoon. Another milestone in the development of these ideas came with the Axford-McKenzie paper (1982). This version seems to put some theoretical oomph into the cartoon, which is a basic one that seems almost inevitably relevant to the way in which magnetic flux propagates across the photosphere in its very interesting patterns.