Magnetic avalanches power solar flares

European Space Agency

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A snapshot taken a second before a powerful solar flare was unleashed from the Sun, as seen in unprecedented detail by Solar Orbiter

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Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team

Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent. This rapidly evolving process creates a ‘sky’ of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides.

The discovery was enabled by one of Solar Orbiter’s most detailed views of a large solar flare, observed during the spacecraft’s 30 September 2024 close approach to the Sun. It is described in a paper being published on Wednesday 21 January in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Solar flares are powerful explosions on the Sun. They occur when energy stored in tangled magnetic fields is suddenly released through a process described as ‘reconnection’. In a matter of minutes, criss-crossing magnetic field lines of opposite direction break and then reconnect. The newly reconnected field lines can quickly heat up and accelerate million-degree plasma, and even high-energy particles, away from the reconnection site, potentially creating a solar flare.

The most powerful flares may start a chain of reactions that lead to geomagnetic storms on Earth, perhaps triggering radio blackouts, which is why it is so important to monitor and understand them.

But the fine-grained details of how exactly this humungous amount of energy is released so rapidly has remained poorly understood. This unprecedented set of new Solar Orbiter observations – from four of the mission’s instruments working in complement to provide the most complete picture of a solar flare ever made – finally has a compelling answer.

High-resolution imagery from Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) zoomed in to features just a few hundred kilometres across in the Sun’s outer atmosphere (its corona), capturing changes every two seconds. Three other instruments – SPICE, STIX and PHI – analysed a range of depths and temperature regimes, from the corona down to the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere. Importantly, the observations enabled scientists to watch the buildup of events that led to the flare over the course of about 40 minutes.

“We were really very lucky to witness the precursor events of this large flare in such beautiful detail,” says Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany, and lead author of the paper. “Such detailed high-cadence observations of a flare are not possible all the time because of the limited observational windows and because data like these take up so much memory space on the spacecraft’s onboard computer. We really were in the right place at the right time to catch the fine details of this flare.”

Magnetic avalanche in action

When EUI first started observing the region at 23:06 Universal Time (UT), about 40 minutes before peak flare activity, a dark arch-like ‘filament’ of twisted magnetic fields and plasma was already present, connected to a cross-shaped structure of progressively brightening magnetic field lines. (see Video 1: main movie)

Zooming in to this feature shows that new magnetic field strands appear in every image frame – equivalent to every two seconds or less. Each strand is magnetically contained, and they become twisted, like ropes. (see Video 2: X shapes)

Then, just like in a typical avalanche, the region becomes unstable. The twisted strands begin to break and reconnect, rapidly triggering a cascade of further destabilisations in the area. This creates progressively stronger reconnection events and outflows of energy, seen as sudden and increasing brightness in the imagery.

One particular brightening begins at 23:29 UT, followed by the dark filament disconnecting from one side, launching into space and at the same time violently unrolling at high speed. Bright sparks of reconnection are seen all along the filament in stunning high resolution as the main flare erupts at around 23:47 UT. (see Video 1: main movie)

“These minutes before the flare are extremely important and Solar Orbiter gave us a window right into the foot of the flare where this avalanche process began,” says Pradeep. “We were surprised by how the large flare is driven by a series of smaller reconnection events that spread rapidly in space and time.”

Scientists had already proposed a simple avalanche model to explain the collective behaviour of hundreds of thousands of flares on the Sun and other stars, but it had not been clear whether a single large flare could be described by an avalanche. What this result shows is exactly that – a flare is not necessarily a single coherent eruption but can be a cascade of interacting reconnection events.

Raining plasma blobs

For the first time, and thanks to the simultaneous measurements by Solar Orbiter’s SPICE and STIX instruments, Pradeep’s team have been able to explore in extremely high resolution how the rapid series of reconnection events deposits energy in the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere. 

Of particular interest is high-energy X-ray emission, which is a signature of where accelerated particles have deposited their energy. Given that accelerated particles can escape into interplanetary space and pose radiation hazards to satellites, astronauts, and even Earth-based technologies, understanding how this process occurs is essential for forecasting space weather. (see Video 4: STIX X-ray observations)

For the 30 September flare, the emission in ultraviolet to X-rays was already slowly rising when SPICE and STIX first started observing the region. The X-ray emission rose so dramatically during the flare itself – as reconnection events increased – that particles were accelerated to speeds of 40–50% the speed of light, equivalent to about 431–540 million km/h. Furthermore, the observations showed that the energy was transferred from the magnetic field to the surrounding plasma during these reconnection events.

“We saw ribbon-like features moving extremely quickly down through the Sun’s atmosphere, even before the main episode of the flare,” says Pradeep. “These streams of ‘raining plasma blobs’ are signatures of energy deposition, which get stronger and stronger as the flare progresses. Even after the flare subsides, the rain continues for some time. It’s the first time we see this at this level of spatial and temporal detail in the solar corona.” (see Video 3: raining plasma blobs, Video 1: main movie)

After the main phase of the flare, the original cross-shape of magnetic field lines is seen to relax in the EUI images, while STIX and SPICE saw the plasma start to cool down and particle emission decrease towards ‘normal’ levels. At the same time, PHI observed the imprint of the flare[NS1]  on the Sun’s visible surface, completing the three-dimensional picture of the event. (see Video 5: surface imprints)

“We didn’t expect that the avalanche process could lead to such high energy particles,” says Pradeep. “We still have a lot to explore in this process, but that would need even higher resolution X-ray imagery from future missions to really disentangle.”

“This is one of the most exciting results from Solar Orbiter so far,” says Miho Janvier, ESA’s Solar Orbiter co-Project Scientist. “Solar Orbiter’s observations unveil the central engine of a flare and emphasise the crucial role of an avalanche-like magnetic energy release mechanism at work. An interesting prospect is whether this mechanism happens in all flares, and on other flaring stars.”

“These exciting observations, captured in incredible detail and almost moment by moment, allowed us to see how a sequence of small events cascaded into giant bursts of energy,” says David Pontin of the University of Newcastle, Australia, who co-authored the paper.

He adds: “By comparing the EUI observations with magnetic-field observations, we were able to disentangle the chain of events that led to the flare. What we observed challenges existing theories for flare energy release and, together with further observations, will allow us to refine those theories to improve our understanding.”

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Notes for editors

 

A magnetic avalanche as the central engine powering a solar flare, by L. P. Chitta et al. is published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202557253   https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202557253

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB). The Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument is led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), Germany.  The Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument is a European-led facility instrument, led by the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) in Paris, France. The STIX X-ray Spectrometer/Telescope is led by FHNW, Windisch, Switzerland.

For more information, please contact:

ESA Media Relations, media@esa.int

---

Journal

Astronomy and Astrophysics

DOI

10.1051/0004-6361/202557253 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A magnetic avalanche as the central engine powering a solar flare

Article Publication Date

21-Jan-2026

Magnetic avalanche in action [VIDEO] 

Solar Orbiter’s most detailed view yet of a large solar flare, with filaments, raining plasma blobs, magnetic reconnection events and X-ray emission labelled

Zooming in on magnetic reconnection [VIDEO]

Solar Orbiter’s high-resolution images reveal the fine-grained detail of the ‘magnetic avalanche’ process that led up to the major solar flare of 30 September 2024.

Zooming in on raining plasma blobs [VIDEO] 

Solar Orbiter saw that, in the lead-up to a solar flare, twisted magnetic fields break and reconnect, creating an outflow of energy that subsequently rains down through the Sun’s atmosphere in ribbon-like streams.

X-rays blast from a solar flare [VIDEO] 

The evolution of X-ray emission during the M7.7 class solar flare recorded by Solar Orbiter in high resolution on 30 September 2024. The coloured contours outline the X-ray source regions detected by the mission’s X-ray Spectrometer/Telescope (STIX) instrument at the measured levels indicated in the key, superposed on top of the images recorded by the mission’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI).

Surface imprint of a solar flare [VIDEO] 

Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument observed the wider-field imprint of the flare on the Sun’s visible surface (photosphere) in impressive detail, completing the three-dimensional picture of the flare.

Credit

ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/PHI Team

AMERIKAN FEMICIDE

Renee Good, Viola Liuzzo and the Fragile Ego

of Masculinism

Phil Wilson

 January 19, 2026

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Viola Liuzzo.

There are a few new things in the US – just recycled atrocities that the media fails to recognize as sequels. In the US flash flood of bad dreams, the latest event in the drive-by-whizz of meaningless horror – the cold-blooded public execution of Renee Good – has come and gone. Good now becomes – at the moment the bullets strike – a sort of wayward example of uncertainty. Why Renee Good? At a casual glance she is none of the things that the US hates murderously – not an immigrant or a communist, not even an atheist. We learn that she has a wife and that she had been previously married twice to male partners. There is no reason to assume that the murderer, Jonathan Ross, knew any of this – and one should not speculate that he acted out of homophobic rage. Have we seen Renee Good before in the shadow play of the US news cycle? Renee Good projects a disturbing ordinariness – an old dog in the back with a grey muzzle, and a child seat next to the dog. Our bleary eyes alight for a moment on a seemingly unremarkable white woman caught in the act of briefly departing from domestic routine. Like all random murder victims, she dies in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We have a history of home-based enemies – Jews, Muslims, atheists, Unitarians, communists, Quakers, socialists – people that the FBI historically side-eyes with a measure of latent disgust, but only sporadically assaults. Fascism pulls up the mask, pulls down the pants, and reveals a fully erect gun that finally has the full blessing of the highest authorities. Renee Good is not the first upstanding White woman to be offered up at the altar of violent sacrifice – even in my own youth, we had Allison Krause (not Allison Krauss, the blue-grass fiddle savant) and Sandra Scheuer. Kent State National Guardsmen panicked and sprayed gunfire. This massacre fell well within the US tradition of mass shootings – the periodic ritual involving guns, crowds, vengeance, and paranoia. Nixon, sociopath, lia,r and war criminal that he was, understood that the optics of repression required that he tread carefully around the issue of murdering upstanding White US citizens. He called a press conference after the shooting and cleverly, in a soft, measured voice, bullshitted the public about his belief that “the protesters” wanted peace just like he did. We are really all on the same side he said. Yeah, this was the sort of flagrant dishonesty that inspired Trump. Trump figured out that racists want their bile in its most transparent form. But America’s homicidal zeal generally has tiptoed around the unique privilege of those living comfortably in the homeland. If Allison Krause and Sandra Scheuer were mere victims of paranoia and chance – catching bullets that momentarily sprayed hatred while seeking random targets – we have an obscure history of political harm toward wayward White women that has been overlooked.

Predictably, Black women are killed by police in greater numbers than White women, but researchers have compellingly argued that class, even more than race, accounts for the demographic details of police killings. One study concluded that poor White people are statistically more likely to be killed by police than middle and upper-middle-class Black people. The murder of Renee Good, however, does not fit into the typical categories of police violence that help us to place the killing of, say, Breonna Taylor into a broader context. Middle and upper-middle-class White women are among the least likely demographics to die by police violence.

However, Good was not killed by police, but by paramilitary forces (even if given official status in the current fascist system). Unlike Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a random hail of bullets by hair trigger police who had forcefully entered Taylor’s apartment in a botched effort to arrest a suspect who was not present, Good seems likely to have been targeted, at least in part, for her gender. We can’t get into the head of the murderer, Jonathan Ross, but it might not be outlandish to guess that Good’s white skin triggered the homicidal response in some way as well. If dark skinned and poor people often risk police ire as a matter of predictable institutional racism, White, educated, middleclass women have a very rare and specific way of falling afoul of violent authorities.

Good’s murder fits into a category so vanishingly small, that I can think of only one single historical incident that shares similar context – the 1965 KKK murder of civil rights volunteer, Viola Liuzzo. It may seem startling to view ICE as the linear offspring of the KKK, but the tie between Klan violence and police killings (as recognized in the famous Rage Against the Machine line, “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses”) ought to make us aware that right wing paramilitary violence has always been an adjunct to official power structures.

Liuzzo entered America’s most terrifying fantasy when a car with four Klansmen (one being an FBI informer) pulled alongside her vehicle on an Alabama road between Selma and Montgomery. She had Michigan license plates and a 19-year-old Black male passenger next to her. She had bravely gone to Alabama to help organize Black voters, and to ferry disenfranchised people to places of registration – in and of itself, a capital offense in Jim Crow states. Thus, the psychological triggers, within the KKK hypervigilant psyche, made her fate inevitable. Her killers likely imagined her as the very symbol of “miscegenation.” A White woman with a younger Black man on a rural stretch of road might have stirred the most violent fear in the White, masculinist heart. A klansman shot her in the head. Like with Renee Good, her car veered and crashed. Her passenger, Leroy Moton, survived by pretending to be dead. In the hierarchy of masculinist rage, the murderous impulse reserves a place for White women who stray from their cultural niche.

But death was not enough retribution – FBI head, J Edgar Hoover, launched a smear campaign against Liuzzo, accusing her of being an adulterer and a heroin addict. The Klan publicly exulted in her murder, posting pictures of her dead body, and “bragging about the murder.” The masculinist, racist mindset mobilized against Viola Liuzzo’s legacy – in death, she might have become the first White, female martyr in the struggle for racial equality. J Edgar Hoover and his allies in the Klan made every effort to erase Viola Liuzzo from historical consciousness. They succeeded in spectacular fashion. We recall John Brown, Medgar Evans, Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and Rev. James Reeb with due reverence, but Viola Liuzzo remains as an obscure footnote.

An undergraduate research paper by Alyssa Ness observed:

“When comparing Liuzzo’s murder to other murders during the civil rights movement, it is evident that she not only received less recognition for her heroic dedication in the movement than others but was also heavily scrutinized by the government and the public through the media for defying traditional white gender roles for women of her time. Louis B. Nichols was hired by the FBI in order to manage the bureau’s interactions with news and media. Nichol’s main role in the bureau was to prevent the bureau from gaining negative attention through media and entertainment by promoting its preferred image, and any media outlet that opposed the FBI would be attacked by supporting media outlets. The FBI and press distorted the reason Liuzzo had participated in the march and what the march was about in order to gain public support. Along with Hoover and the press, traditional middle class white women tormented the legacy of Liuzzo with accusations of her being mentally ill because she was not solely fulfilled by the role of a homemaker and mother. The public and media also heavily criticized Jim Liuzzo due to his inability to keep his wife under control. The New York Times published an article calling out Liuzzo for failing to deter his wife from her fate.”

Carolyn Bryant acted out the prescribed role for southern women in the Jim Crow era. Bryant, you may recall, accused Emmet Till of making advances on her as she clerked in her family-owned grocery store in Drew, Mississippi. Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was abducted, tortured, and murdered by Bryant’s husband and another KKK-affiliated accomplice 11 years prior to Liuzzo’s murder. Perhaps Liuzzo’s killing sheds light on the psychology of Carolyn Bryant. Women like Bryant knew all too well that vigilant male paranoia circumscribed White female sexuality. Miscegenation was a crime on the books in Jim Crow states, and, as Viola Liuzzo’s fate showed, it took little evidence to provoke the paramilitary institutions that enforced antiquated laws with brutal informality.

The lynching of Emmet Till and the murder of Viola Liuzzo are linked directly to current expressions of hyper-masculine self-doubt. Renee Good, like Liuzzo, violated the unwritten rules of racial propriety that racist White men demand. Female moral fortitude in a racist society will often be conflated with sexual abandonment. In a right-wing ecosystem featuring men who obsessively ruminate about rejection (consider the widespread “Incel” movement), acts of White female resistance to racist violence serve as symbols of sexual rejection.

As White women commit themselves to the battle against ICE, the right-wing pundit sphere will indulge in ever more flamboyant methods to label activism as sexual deviance. My point is well illustrated by the lunatic writer, Naomi Wolf, in this post on X:

“Okay, I’ll just say it. I’ve seen enough videos of the faces of liberal white women in conflict with @ICE, to know what is up. Liberal men at this point (sorry) are disproportionately estrogenized, physically passive, submissive due to woke gender hectoring, or porn-addicted. White liberal women are disproportionately sexually frustrated. Policing others as in the pandemic was an outlet for them, but it was not nearly enough. The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE – who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men – because the conflict is a form of physical release for them. They long for actual kinetic battle and it will get even uglier.”

The right-wing politicians and pundits now engage in a desperate struggle to tarnish the memory of Renee Good and to prevent her from becoming a martyr. They will alternately insist that she engaged in domestic terrorism or that she channeled her sexual frustrations into a vicarious rendezvous with the “real men” who work for ICE. When Ross murdered Good, he sneered, “fucking bitch,” as her dead body lay in the moving car. How many men have murdered women who rejected them? Now this inchoate rage against rejection becomes a subconscious theme affixed to a new wave of political violence. While Viola Liuzzo stands out as a historical anomaly, violence toward middle-class White women who confront the brutal treatment of dark-skinned targets of the fascist state will almost certainly occur again.

I don’t believe that Renee Good’s legacy will be destroyed as authorities sullied the memory of Viola Liuzzo. We have the video for Good as we did not for Liuzzo. But isn’t it long overdue that Viola Liuzzo be recognized as one of the great heroes of the civil rights era? After all, Liuzzo’s heroism helps us to understand the tragedy of Renee Good.

Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker who has written for Common Dreams, CounterPunch, Resilience, Current Affairs, The Future Fire and The Hampshire Gazette. Phil’s writings are posted regularly at Nobody’s Voice.

UK

Woke-Bashing of the Week: From Christmas

to cardigans – the latest ‘anti-men’ panic

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

18 January, 2026
Right-Wing Watch


Quite what constitutes “the very worst left-wing feminist” remains unclear, beyond, perhaps, a woman who doesn’t particularly enjoy being corrected by men.

With Christmas out of the way and the annual ritual of declaring everything “cancelled” complete, the anti-woke brigade has its sights on the next cultural event – Valentine’s Day.

This time, the outrage is directed at retailer Target, over the release of two colourful sweaters released ahead of February 14. According to the Daily Mail, one is pink and emblazoned with “Dump Him” in bold red lettering, and the other is light blue, with “Emotionally Unavailable” written in black.

Despite what the paper describes as “seemingly harmless messaging,” the Mail reports how the designs were swiftly seized upon by social media users, who accused Target of promoting “anti-men” sentiment. The article quotes a so-called men’s rights activist who posted a photo of the display on X:

“I saw this sweater promoted at Target today. Could you imagine if, in the month leading up to Valentine’s Day, Target was spotlighting a “Dump Her” sweater in the men’s section?” they said.

Others followed suit. “More women hating men propaganda. Gee, shocker,” wrote one user.

“Target is woke,” declared another. “Anti-male garbage. I stopped shopping at Target a long time ago,” snarked a third.

To give the impression of a pattern, the Mail reminded readers of Target’s previous brush with controversy over its Pride collection, specifically, its failure to remove placeholder ‘lorem ipsum’ text from some product tags, as though a design oversight and a pair of tongue-in-cheek sweaters belong to the same moral crisis.

This fixation with an alleged ‘anti-men’ movement has become a recurring theme in the right-wing press. Last month, Telegraph columnist Celia Walden asked: “Are you a woman who hates men? Then the Greens are the perfect party for you.”

Her column cited a leaked 53-page Green Party report which, she claimed, showed party leaders considering an expanded definition of misogyny. Among the supposed horrors was a proposal to include “men who correct women” within that definition. Walden warned that such a move would appeal only to “the very worst left-wing feminist”.

Quite what constitutes “the very worst left-wing feminist” remains unclear, beyond, perhaps, a woman who doesn’t particularly enjoy being corrected by men.