2D Current-Sheet Reconnection: GOES Flare Classifier

A Harris current sheet — the standard 2D model of an antiparallel magnetic field pressed thin by shear — is traced live from its stream function, so what you see are genuine field lines integrated along the local Bx, By at every frame, not a repainted 3D render. As shear thinning drives the sheet's half-thickness δ down, Ohm's law (E = ηJ with the sheet's own current density B₀/δ) sets the reconnection electric field; once δ bottoms out, that field collapses into a real GOES-classified X-ray light curve computed frame by frame from the live δ(t) trajectory, while the perturbed field lines pinch into magnetic islands that are ejected along the sheet as plasmoids — the 2D analogue of a coronal mass ejection, and the same plasmoid-mediated mechanism increasingly linked to real solar flares.