WASHINGTON (Reuters) - X-ray images taken from a new international spacecraft show that the Sun's magnetic field is much more turbulent than scientists knew, NASA reported on Wednesday. They saw twisting plumes of gas rising from the Sun's corona and reacting with the star's magnetic field, a process that releases energy and may power solar storms and coronal mass ejections, which in turn affect the Earth. A turbulent magnetic field would, in theory, generate more energy than a steady-state field. "Theorists suggested that twisted, tangled magnetic fields might exist," Leon Golub, senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said...
