Evolution of a solar campfire and its magnetic field as generated in a computer simulation. ‘Campfires’ are miniature solar flares discovered by ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission in 2020.

The left panel shows a magnetogram, where black and white are opposite polarities, and grey is zero field. The right panel shows simulated coronal emission replicating what is seen by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. Overplotted on both panels in red are the contours of the brightest emission. Each of these contours represents one campfire.

In a new study the brightest seven events are investigated, revealing that the energy released from the brightenings throughcomponent reconnection – where field lines that are almost parallel break and reconnect – may be enough to maintain the temperature of the solar corona predicted from observations.