(Polar Crown Prominences)
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/17sep_polarcrown.htm

"Japan's Hinode spacecraft, launched in 2006 on a mission to study the sun, is beaming back movies that astonish even seasoned investigators.

'That was a polar crown prominence recorded by Hinode on Nov. 30, 2006,' says Dr. Thomas Berger of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. 'It is a curved wall of 10,000o plasma about 90,000 km long and 30,000 km tall.'

[...]

Solar astronomers have seen prominences like this before, thousands of them, but never so clearly. The new view is challenging long-held ideas: In the past, researchers thought of prominences as mainly static structures, held motionless above the surface of the sun by magnetic force fields. Now we know those ideas are too simple...'

[...]

'Narrow streams of plasma at the top of the prominence are constantly falling back to the bottom, much like a waterfall.' Mysteriously, the streams plummet faster than ambient magnetic forces seem to allow ('The plasma is not in freefall,' explains Berger, 'but it is falling much faster than magnetic diffusion would predict -- up to 10 km/sec.')

'Finally, within the wall itself, there are swirls and vortices'

The inescapable conclusion: 'There's no such thing as a static prominence.' Furthermore, he says, 'we don't understand how the sun's magnetic field is doing all these things.'

[...]

The central sheets form between regions of opposite-polarity magnetic field. That's significant because opposite magnetic fields bumping together tend to explode—a process physicists call 'reconnection.'

[...]

"These data are leading solar physicists to reexamine theories of prominence dynamics and will certainly lead to new and exciting breakthroughs," believes Berger."

Maybe they'll finally figure out that their models are incomplete because these aren't "static magnetic" structures, they're electric structures. Magnetic fields do not exist in the absence of electric currents!

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/magnetic/magfie.html
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wmfield.html
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_field
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_current#Electromagnetism

Refusing to 'deal' electrically, seems to be the biggest issue holding them back... They're dealing with a byproduct rather than the thing itself.

The process physicists call 'reconnection' has been long since labeled pseudo-science by electrical engineers (Hannes Alfvén & Don Scott, among others). 'Reconnection' is just a poor showing of physics in an attempt to get around talking in electrical terms:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19870013880_1987013880.pdf
http://members.cox.net/dascott3/IEEE-TransPlasmaSci-Scott-Aug2007.pdf

The first of the two papers above (by Alfvén) also repudiates the notion of "frozen-in" magnetic field lines in plasma. Plasma is NOT a permanent magnet! It is also not a perfect conductor (as many physicists incorrectly treat it).

Heck, even NASA's Cosmicopia Ask-A-Physicist program's answers to users appear to invalidate "magnetic reconnection."

http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_gp_elm.html#stopmag

Q: Is there any way a magnetic field can be stopped or broken?

A: You can't cut magnetic fields...

...it all comes back to the assumption that there are no magnetic monopoles. If there were magnetic monopoles, then at that point in space there would be more magnetic field lines exiting a region than entering it (or vice versa), the same way you CAN have electric field lines entering or exiting a region where there is a net charge like a single electron. So far, in spite of many experiments looking for magnetic monopoles, none have been found. If they are found, then we know how to revise the theory of magnetism to allow for "cut" field lines, but so far those changes have not been needed.

[...]

Then, if you want to take the next step, Google "magnetic reconnection" and open a whole new world of questions regarding the cutting of magnetic field lines.

While he doesn't specifically / explicitly say "magnetic reconnection is bunkum," the implications of the statements he DOES make are quite clear (the last statement is, however, an implicit jab at reconnection). Magnetic fields are continuous. They cannot be snapped, broken, 'reconnected,' etc. It just doesn't work that way!

Regards,
~Michael Gmirkin