Braided current sheets glow softly in visible and infrared light along the Cygnus Loop of the Veil Nebula. Image credit: W. P. Blair, R. Sankrit (Johns Hopkins University / NASA.
Electric currents in parallel attract each other, as you can see here (watch it at MIT):
Two flexible wires are suspended vertically. The wires are connected in series or parallel to a 12 V storage battery. When the wires are connected in series and power is applied they will repel each other; when they are connected in parallel they will attract one another.
Understanding Birkeland currents is important to get a glimpse of what electric currents circulating through plasma are capable of.
