The magnetic environment around the Sun is a jumbled mess of chaotic fields and streams of charged particles. Recently we’ve been getting at least slightly better at mapping out its complexity, thanks in large part to data collected by missions like the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter. But there’s still a large grey area surrounding the interface between the large scale hydrodynamic properties of plasmas and the microscopic properties of individual ions, and scientists believe understanding large scale features of the Sun, such as why its corona is so much hotter than its surface, may rely on our knowledge of that interface. A new paper that directly tackles some of the outstanding questions about that interface was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Masatomi Iizawa of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors.

For decades, solar physicists have used two competing methodologies to handle their models of the solar wind.…