The Heliospheric Imagers on board National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s twin STEREO spacecraft show that coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can be visually complex structures. To explore this complexity, we created a citizen science project with the U.K. Science Museum, in which participants were shown pairs of CME images and asked to decide which image in each pair appeared the most “complicated.” A Bradley‐Terry model was then applied to these data to rank the CMEs by their “complicatedness,” or “visual complexity.” This complexity ranking revealed that the annual average visual complexity values follow the solar activity cycle, with a higher level of complexity being observed at the peak of the cycle. The average complexity of CMEs observed by STEREO‐A was also found to be significantly higher than those observed by STEREO‐B. Visual complexity was found to be associated with CME size and brightness, but our results suggest that complexity may be influenced by the scale‐sizes of structure in the CMEs.

中文翻译：

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日冕周期的冠状物质抛射的视觉复杂性

美国国家航空航天局（NASA）的双STEREO航天器上的日球成像仪显示，日冕物质抛射（CME）可以是视觉上复杂的结构。为了探索这种复杂性，我们与英国科学博物馆共同创建了一项公民科学项目，向参与者展示了成对的CME图像，并要求他们决定每对图像中最“复杂”的图像。然后，将Bradley-Terry模型应用于这些数据，以按CME的“复杂性”或“视觉复杂性”对其进行排名。这种复杂性排名显示，年度平均视觉复杂性值遵循太阳活动周期，在周期的峰值处观察到更高级别的复杂性。还发现，STEREO-A观察到的CME的平均复杂度明显高于STEREO-B观察到的CME。