Around the same time that a sizable rock created the Hiawatha impact crater in Greenland, alligators and caimans split apart into two different groups. Both groups have continued to exist throughout the millennia, a seeming relic of the time of the dinosaurs. And now, that relic is helping us understand a particular solar feature. No, really.

Let’s start at the beginning. Have you ever watched one of the videos on YouTube that show paint dancing in neat patterns on a speaker? That mechanic is called Faraday excitation, and it was first demonstrated by scientist Michael Faraday way back in 1831 using a plastic membrane in a shallow fluid. And it turns out that a similar dance is occurring in the solar plasma at the surface of the Sun, causing something named ‘spicules’ to appear. But scientists were having a rough time understanding just what caused these spikes on the Sun.

Enter the alligators.

During mating displays, male alligators submerge just below the water’s surface and bellow at bass frequencies that then resonate in the water and cause jets to dance on the surface. And these jets work the same way as paint on a speaker. And they could work the same way as the solar spicules on the Sun.

Per the press release: Essentially, the ubiquitous and well-understood convection in the lower solar atmosphere – analogous to boiling water in a hot pan – serves almost periodic but strong kicks to the plasma in the solar chromosphere, the shallow layer just above the visible solar surface. The material in the chromosphere is 500 times lighter than the photosphere, meaning these strong kicks from the bottom shoot the chromospheric specular plasma outward in the form of elongated jets, between 300-1000 km wide and 5000-30000 km tall.

At any one point in time, there are over three million spicules on the Sun, and this new research, published in Nature Physics, shows that the internal solar convection can be the driving force for the wide variety of heights and speeds seen. This new information can be used to further understand the forces behind the solar wind and the mechanisms for heating the solar corona to millions of Kelvin.

Alligators, paint, and the Sun. Science works in amazing and strange ways, folks.

More Information

Eötvös Loránd University press release

“Polymeric jets throw light on the origin and nature of the forest of solar spicules,” Sahel Dey et al., 2022 March 3, Nature Physics

VIDEO: From alligator mating calls to heavenly dance of the Sun (YouTube)