| Abstract : | Solar spicules are thin jets comprising of cold and dense chromospheric plasma making constant incursions into the much hotter coronal plasma. They cover about 1% of the solar surface and range in diameter from 300-1000 km. Observations reveal a forest of 3 million spicules at any point in time on the Sun with a distribution of heights. The existing belief in the community is that different mechanisms are responsible for two different classes of spicules - shocks & pulses, granular squeezing, solar global oscillations & magneto-acoustic waves for slower and shorter spicules (type-I), compared to Alfvén waves, magnetic reconnection, ion-neutral coupling etc for faster and longer jets (type-II). So far, models based on these drivers have not been able to quantitatively match both the heights and abundance of the observed solar spicules. We will present our recent solar simulations with subsurface convection that provides new insights, contrary to the existing framework, into the formation mechanisms of a forest of spicules. |
