Over the weekend the Sun let go with a relatively decent-sized flare and prominence: a towering ejection of matter from its surface. At the time, I couldn’t find an embeddable version of the video, but happily Goddard Space Flight Center (my old stomping ground!) put one up on Flickr. So feast your eyes on this incredible video of the event as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on February 24, 2011:
In the immortal words of noted solar astrophysicist Christopher Walken: wowee wow wow!
[Edited to add: I should've been more clear in my post title that this is a flare and a prominence, and in fact the motion of the material in the video is the prominence.]
Details of the science of what you’re seeing are expounded upon in a previous post on solar flares. The sunspot that triggered this was on the edge of the Sun, so weren’t in any danger (and wouldn’t have been even had it been aimed at us; this was a class M 3.6 flare, well below what the Sun is capable of). This video shows the Sun in the ultraviolet, where magnetic activity reveals itself well. You can see the ...
Full story at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/cVscmeziI3g/
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment