Imagine a mountain range many times larger than the entire Earth, floating in mid-air, held up by nothing you can see. It sounds like something from a fantasy novel but that is essentially what solar prominences are and for decades, scientists have struggled to explain how they exist at all. A team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany has just published the most realistic simulations yet of how these extraordinary structures form and survive, and the results shed new light on one of the Sun's most dramatic, and potentially dangerous features. Solar prominence (Credit : NASA) Solar prominences are vast clouds of superheated gas that erupt from the Sun's surface and hang suspended in its outer atmosphere, the corona. They can stretch for hundreds of thousands of kilometres, dwarfing anything in our Solar System, and yet they are made of material far cooler than their surroundings. The corona burns at over a million degrees.…