Click here to view a Quicktime movie of the quivering coronal loop.

The corona is the halo of white light seen around the Sun during solar eclipses. It is held against the Sun's surface by the force of the solar magnetic field. In the Sun's northern and southern hemispheres, the force of the magnetic field is arrayed in loops. They appear as tremendous arches that rise into the corona attracting charged particles called plasma.

Leon Ofman, a solar physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., compares the solar magnetic field to the field of a typical magnet. "If you take the magnet and place a paper on top of it and sprinkle some metal you would see field lines, right? So basically it's a very similar thing, but here, instead of these metal chips, you have the plasma.

"So basically you have a region of positive polarity and a region of negative polarity and you have these loops connecting between these two regions," Ofman said.