The Sun's Impossible Floating Mountains

The Sun's Impossible Floating Mountains By Mark Thompson - April 28, 2026 11:32 PM UTC | Solar Astronomy Imagine a mountain range many times larger than the entire Earth, floating in mid-air, held up by nothing you can see. It sounds like something from a fantasy novel but that is essentially what solar prominences are and for decades, scientists have struggled to explain how they exist at all. A team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany has just published the most realistic simulations yet of how these extraordinary structures form and survive, and the results shed new light on one of the Sun's most dramatic, and potentially dangerous features. Solar prominence (Credit : NASA) Solar prominences are vast clouds of superheated gas that erupt from the Sun's surface and hang suspended in its outer atmosphere, the corona. They can stretch for hundreds of thousands of kilometres, dwarfing anything in our Solar System, and yet they are made of material far cooler than their surroundings. The corona burns at over a million degrees. The prominences within it sit at around ten thousand degrees which is cool enough, in solar terms, to be considered almost cold. It’s as if a giant iceberg were floating inside a furnace, refusing to melt. What keeps them there is the Sun's magnetic field. Loops of magnetic force arch out of the Sun's surface and create dips where cooler plasma can collect and be held in place. But for a prominence to survive for weeks or even months, as many do, it needs a constant supply of fresh material. Lose that supply, and it fades. If it doesn't fade quietly, it will erupt, hurling billions of tonnes of charged particles into space. If that cloud reaches Earth, the consequences can range from spectacular auroras to serious disruption of power grids and satellites. The new computer simulations are based on a magnetic field structure that is often associated with prominences: the magnetic field lines in the corona form a double ...