Multiple-Intelligences Neural Interfacing Optimization Node
I'm a geek. No. Really. Really geeky. And I write poetry. And I read poetry. I'm an English teacher to-be.
(via APOD: 2012 May 27 - Mercury Spotting)
You may have trouble seeing it, but Mercury is transiting the Sun in this set of images (of varying ultraviolet wavelengths, hence the color difference) from SOHO.
What you won’t have trouble seeing is Venus transiting the Sun next week: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus,_2012
I mean, you’re s.o.l. in lots of South America and Western Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula, but:
Be sure to make a pinhole viewer or other reflected viewing if you’re going to watch. Evening of June 5 for North America; morning of June 6 for Europe and the Middle East. Whole damn thing for parts of the Pacific Ocean.
(via Jupiter, acting all superior | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
Quoth Phil:
You can see an emerging coronal mass ejection on the left: that’s the bulb-shaped thingy. It’s actually an incredibly violent expulsion of a billion tons of subatomic particles hurled away at high speed due to the explosive discharge of the Sun’s magnetic field… but that’s not why I posted this picture.
You can also see streamers coming from the Sun; those are places where particles flow freely into space from the Sun. Basically, the magnetic field of the Sun trails into space in those locations, allowing the wind to escape. But that’s not why I’m showing you this picture, either.
Look on the left. See that weird dot with the horizontal line through it? That’s Jupiter! The line is not real; it’s where the camera got overexposed by the planet (digital detectors — like your phone camera — convert photons of light into electrons, and if a source is too bright, the electrons overflow the pixels like water from a bucket. The way the camera works, the electrons flow along the horizontal grid of pixels, creating these lines. This is called “blooming”).
Image credit: NASA/ESA/SOHO
(via Hear the Sun’s roar | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
The X-class flare and CME recorded by SOHO and MESSENGER (around Mercury) gets translated from electromagnetic waves into sound.
SOLAR ACTIVITY UPDATE: M8.7-Class Flare Associated With an Earth Bound CME(Jan 23rd 2012). (by Skyywatcher88)
We just caught part of a wave of material from a coronal mass ejection earlier (last night was great for aurorae if you live far enough north) and it looks like more may be headed our way. This is a “just barely still M-class” solar flare with a CME. If you want to be amazed, check about 28 seconds in as the video goes over the event in various wavelengths.
I actually kind of thrill to watch the instruments overload (the bright, spiked areas that lose all detail are overloads) from the output of something like this.
This is what happens when a giant ball of plasma that houses nuclear fusion reactions gets its magnetic field lines all tangled up.
(via APOD: 2011 October 5 - Comet and CME on the Sun)
A sungrazer comet streaks in and breaks up right before a huge coronal mass ejection on the sun. From the SOHO sun-orbiting satellite and the two STEREO satellites, we can see that the most likely explanation is a coincidence. The Sun is in a highly-active period, and you can see at least 3 lesser CMEs happening in the video while the comet is still approaching, it just so happens that the timing matches on this pair of rather common events. (Sungrazer comets come too close and finally break up all that time.)
Still, the CME itself is pretty damn impressive in size, and it’s always interesting to watch a comet burn up.
Using sound waves, scientist manning the two big NASA solar observatories, SOHO and SDO, have been able to see 60,000 km beneath the surface of the sun to catch a sunspot forming 2 days before we see it as an actual sunspot.
Here’s Phil’s explanation:
Basically, inside the Sun, hot plasma (gas stripped of one or more electrons) rises and cooler plasma sinks. As it moves, it generates turbulence. This in turn creates acoustic waves — sounds — that travel through the Sun. As these waves move through the solar interior, regions with different densities make them speed up or slow down. The physics of this is pretty well understood, so by mapping how long it takes a wave to move between two points, the density of the stuff between them can be measured.
And to do this, they collect a seriously insane amount of data from those two observatories. Billions of data points. They’ve got some pretty damn good algorithms for filtering the noise, and are increasing how much forewarning they can give of new sunspots. Very useful considering that the subatomic particles flying at a good fraction of the speed of light that a solar flare or coronal mass ejection can throw off are dangerous to satellites, the ISS, and even our power grid down here.
(via Amazing video of comet on a solar death dive | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
“Last month, on May 10/11, a bright comet took the Final Plunge, dropping into the Sun. It either broke up and evaporated or actually impacted the Sun, because it wasn’t seen to reappear around the other side. Here’s the video, taken using NASA’s SOHO satellite…
Pretty cool! You can see the Sun erupting with a coronal mass ejection, too. It’s tempting to wonder if the two are related, but in fact the CME let go before the comet had even had a chance to interact with the Sun’s magnetic field (CMEs are essentially magnetic events).”
I love this blog.
