00:03the sun is setting up to reach its solar maximum or the apex of its 11-year solar cycle in
00:09the
00:09summer of 2025 and up until that point it's going to be a wild time for our solar system's central
00:14star including more intense solar flares but on earth in a lab scientists have just created their
00:19own micro solar flare that could help us better understand these cosmic events the team used a
00:24device which turns electrical bursts into long strings of plasma of course real solar flares
00:28erupt when the sun's magnetic field lines snap and reconnect ejecting solar winds out into space
00:33but the researchers say the principle is the same and it's giving us a higher resolution look at a
00:38process we don't yet fully understand with the researchers writing solar observations detect
00:43energetic particles and hard x-rays but cannot reveal the generating mechanism because the
00:47particle acceleration happens at a smaller scale than the observation resolution and even though
00:52our magnetosphere can stop much of the sun's extreme radiation some of its solar flares are so intense
00:57they can still mess with our planet's technology the lab-made solar flares are only around seven and
01:01a half inches long and only last for around 10 microseconds but the researchers say they've already
01:06figured out that the strands that make up a solar flare are responsible for the x-ray bursts followed
01:11by a negative voltage spike just the first of likely many discoveries related to their tiny lab-made solar
01:18solar flares
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