Airline flight crews who travel these routes frequently can accumulate as many as .9 rem a year. This is more than the allowed annual dosages for nuclear plant operators and comparable to what shuttle astronauts receive during a typical one-week mission. You can observe the effect by hooking one end of a copper wire to a battery, making a couple of loops and then holding the free end near the other battery terminal. Set a compass next to the loops. When you touch the wire to the terminal, allowing current to flow, the compass needle will twitch, registering the magnetic field you have created.
Currents also flow in the sun.
Although an ordinary atom is electrically neutral, the temperature inside the sun is hot enough to strip electrons off atoms, producing a stew of negatively charged electrons and positively charged atomic nuclei called a plasma. These plasmas boil like oatmeal in a pot, heated by the 15 million-degree nuclear hot plate deep in the core. As they rise toward the surface, they cool and begin to sink in a process called convection. Convection currents take up nearly one-third of the outer portion of the sun. By means still unknown, rivers of charged particles sometimes generate powerful magnetic fields that loop like gigantic ropes and sometimes push to the surface.