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To: Snowshoe who wrote (278366)	11/3/2008 3:08:33 PM
From: nrg_crisis	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 794012

Strange Portal Connects Earth to Sun Interesting - thanks for posting that. The word 'portals' is a bit of an unfortunate choice in this context. It's not like a rabbit-hole that we can jump into and travel to the sun, nor is it like the 'tesseract' of Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful novel A Wrinkle In Time. What the researchers are saying (if I understand the article correctly) is that the solar wind, a stream of high-energy protons from the sun, may not flow at a constant, steady rate like water in a stream. Instead, it may flow in bursts when the magnetic fields of the sun and earth 'reconnect' with each other. When that happens, the 'portal' is opened and the solar wind can flow in a burst like a lightning bolt, another plasma phenomenon like the solar wind. The solar wind, by the way, is what produces the aurora borealis here on earth. Seeing an aurora should be on everyone's 'bucket list'. It's one of the most beautiful of all natural phenomena. nrg