All the astronomy sites are buzzing over this amazing image of a
sunspot: |Click to embiggen.| I don’t blame them… it’s gorgeous!
And it’s not even real! It’s a computer-generated model of the
magnetic field in a sunspot; near the center the field lines are
mostly vertical and around the edges they are mostly horizontal.
But to me, as a scientist as well as an appreciator of gee-whiz
images, it’s this shot that tickles my brain: Click it to see it
cromulently embiggened. I know, it doesn’t seem like quite as
much to look at, but it is: it’s the first time a computer has
modeled in detail the magnetic field line strengths of a pair of
coupled sunspots vertically, in three dimensions, into and
beneath the surface of the Sun! Wow. You have to understand,
magnetic fields are the devil’s own work to model; they’re
fiercely complicated. The equations are tough enough to solve,
but the field lines interact with one another as the gas moves
around, making this sort of modeling just as painfully hard as
it could be. W