The torrent of corona related discoveries keeps coming. Lately we’ve covered a variety of potential solutions to the “coronal heating problem” - why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface. Now, a paper led by a team of researchers from the University of Newcastle, Indian Institute for Astrophysics, and University of Sheffield, offers another answer - that we’ve been viewing the “spicules” that form in the lower solar atmosphere all wrong.

Spicules are spike-like geysers of plasma that shoot up into the solar atmosphere at tens of kilometers per second, eventually collapsing back down towards the surface after a few minutes. There are thought to be tens of thousands of these along the solar edge, and potentially millions of them at any given time across the entire surface of the Sun. Scientists have always treated them like miniature plasma tornados, with each individual “spike” acting as an individual.

The paper calls that into question.…