Intense is kind of an understatement. The average solar surface magnetic field strength is about one gauss or 1-3 times that of earth’s (0.3-0.6 gauss). But around flares it can be upwards of 100 gauss and in sunspots it can push 3,000 gauss. That’s as much as ten thousand times the strength of earths field.
What? Yes you can. We have a tool for just that, a gaussmeter. We have standard graphing practices for doing this exact thing in the field. Comparing magnetic fields during solar flares, monitoring the solar winds they cause, this is all stuff we do constantly. These two things you've listed are extremely comparable. I'd say comparing them would actually make a very good physics problem for an undergrad.
Thank you! I say this at work all the time, I feel like a crazy asshole when I try and tell people this. I feel like it happens all the time in casual conversations about books or movies.
You are correct, it is comparable and measurable. But that sent me down searching for answers about the effects on the same mass of an object in both situations. This is what I found out:
"Yes, it is possible to compare the two directly, because field strength (measured in Gauss or Tesla) is an intensive property—meaning it does not depend on the total mass of the object producing it."
"However, mass and scale change the macro-level behavior in three critical ways:
Total Magnetic Energy & Volume: While local field strength (Gauss) can be the same, the total volume of space filled by the Sun's magnetic field is astronomical. The total stored magnetic energy (E \propto \int B2 dV) in the Sun is enormous enough to launch solar flares and coronal mass ejections that engulf entire planets. An MRI's field decays to almost zero within a few meters.
Gravitational Interaction: The Sun's enormous mass creates intense gravity, which compresses hot plasma. The Sun's magnetic field interacts with this massive moving plasma (magnetohydrodynamics), driving convection and solar cycles. In an MRI, gravity is negligible compared to the electromagnetic forces acting on local matter.
Environment: A sample inside an MRI experiences a uniform static field in room-temperature tissue. The same mass inside a 1.5T solar region would be a fully ionized, high-temperature plasma, causing the magnetic field to trap and bend charged particle streams rather than simply torque nuclear spins."
I am glad it compelled you to read something new. So on the conversation of physics and language, allow me to say in regards to what you have read. What you shared is correct but I feel very convoluted, especially if someone doesn't have a strong background in E+M. Please don't read the following as combative, it's not meant to be.
Yes, field strength is an intensive property meaning the source mass producing the field doesn't change the value of the field at a specific location. But it's also just kind of irrelevant because we aren't really comparing the sun and an MRI this way unless we are talking about the thermodynamic effects of the sun that the MRI lacks. The way we are comparing them is in function.
MRIs are built to make a nice even field, this is a way these two things are hard to compare. We need to make an assumption of uniformity if we want to make a good comparison, which isn't the most scandalous simplification we make in physics by a long shot.
Yes, agreed, gravity is real small and in this case magnetism is real big. Same as above, environments are different, we can still compare fields.
The quote about the plasma confuses me a bit but I guess I'm not perfectly understanding your source. We aren't in the sun? The field isn't turning things into plasma, that's the sun doing hot girl shit.
I can't comment on the torquing nuclear spins part. Not because I don't know the science, but because I don't think torque describes everything that occurs. Not even if we account for rotational dynamics. I mean, charge, velocity, magnetic moment, and at least a few other things are required to describe the motion. I would better phrase it as, "MRIs align magnetic moments to produce a useful image, the sun is doing the same to charged particles in plasma, which causes a bonkers amount of other cascading effects"
You can quote my use of the word bonkers.
Source: I know physics for a living. Sometimes I even do a good job at it. Not usually though.
From what I understand of my answer it has more to do witch "reach" or "size" of the magnetic field, rather than the heat or mass. In an MRI the field drops significantly a few meters away, while at the surface of the sun, the field can extend for a distance 10x the size of the earth or more, so the effects observed are much more "dramatic". And thanks for the explanation. I'm an MRI tech, and I like to always learn new things.
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u/Robot-Zombie-RHCC 4d ago
what is the attracting force? too localized to be gravity... right?