Missing pieces of the solar jigsaw puzzle

Tsiklauri, David, Missing pieces of the solar jigsaw puzzle, Astronomy and Geophysics, 50, 5.32-5.38 (2009) (ADS)

The cartoon

(click on the image for a larger version)

Here we have a nice, delicately colored, physically labeled view of the heart of magnetic reconnection. In this view the author is trying to represent the real physics, as we understand it on a microscopic level, rather than the fluffy misinterpretations we often get from astronomers. Look! Do you see a demagnetized electron hunting for its new "field line"? Or, do you see a "field line" that does not represent the ions very well? Another telling thing - do you see any hint of turbulence in the field pattern? Or agyrotropic distribution functions? The author may have been depicting a "laminar" reconnection that only exists in the cartoon world.

Date: 2009 August 12

Update: 2019 December 02