By Tanya Lewis
A pair of giant gassy plumes recently ejected by the sun ricocheted off each other like bouncy balls, changing solar physicists’ ideas about how these eruptions of charged particles and magnetic fields can behave.
Captured on camera by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory probes in November 2008, the two balls of charged gas smashed together and rebounded with more energy of motion than they had initially, scientists report online October 7 in Nature Physics. The phenomenon is known as a superelastic collision.