Solar Flare Model: Van de Graaff and Bunny Hair
Playing with the Van de Graaff generator today lead to a surprise - how well solar flares can be modeled with some bunny hairs. The images do not do it justice - will work on better ones.
Fig 1 Bunny fur on Van de Graaff
Fig 2 More bunny fur on Van de Graaff
The fur was first sucked onto the metal sphere. Then as the fur began to take on charge, it did several things. It formed loops, like coronal loops, which you can kind of see in Fig 1. In other places it went straight out, like polar coronal fields - you can see that more in Fig 2.
Then, some of the loops lifted off, and accelerated away. It was the way they accelerated that made me immediately think of coronal mass ejections off the surface of the Sun. I grabbed my phone, and made this video of the furry Van de Graaff, which, like an animal performing, did not perform for the camera like it just had for me. It is hard to convey, how the fur had that "tension" one sees in the SDO movies of CMEs, and how the hairs look like the glowing threads one sees in the solar images.
I will try to get better video. Next step would be to get slow motion, and do velocity analysis to see if it really does mimic CMEs.