In the September 2013 issue of Physics Today (page 12), Johanna Miller describes the quest to determine how magnetic reconnection powers solar flares. Plasma structures tantalizingly suggestive of reconnection have been observed from the ground and from space since the 1960s. The new images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly that she cites offer higher angular resolution, but they cannot overcome a basic limitation: Studies of coronal morphology and motions can never, in themselves, demonstrate the existence of reconnection.
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