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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.
cwnl:
Big aluminum sphere will heat gases to 500,000 degrees
Researchers will be able to simulate the superheated gases that form the sun’s magnetic field with a one-of-a-kind sphere that moved Wednesday into a new physics lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The hollow aluminum sphere, built by four Wisconsin companies for $2.5 million, looks like the famous Death Star from “Star Wars” movies. Weighing 11,000 pounds, it was built to superheat gases to 500,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Researchers say it will help them study how magnetic fields are generated in planets and stars, and better understand why the sun occasionally spews out particles that affect the Earth as “space weather,” knocking out satellites and even taking down power grids, explained Cary Forest, a UW-Madison physics professor.
photo via University of Wisconsin-Madison (more photos and video)
Amazing! Hopefully this sort of research and technology could lead into newer tech that may be more resistant to space weather and perhaps better power grids for the distant future. I know this is a mere study, but it seems like it can yield a lot of aid for current applications. And the fact that it’s a mini “death-star” look-alike makes it twice as awesome.
It was driving me crazy that the weight was given in pounds and the temperature in degrees Farenheit…and then I clicked through to see the story was from a newspaper.
I wish science reporters would just start putting everything in kilograms and Kelvins, for the love of all that is scientific.
(via polymath4ever)
(via APOD: 2011 November 15 - Orange Sun Scintillating)
Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has shared plenty of the detail of Alan Friedman’s work with the Sun. Here’s a great full shot of our parent star. You can see AR 1339 off to the right.
This image was originally shot in hydrogen-alpha filter, then inverted for processing. The “bright” edge is actually dark. This is a known phenomenon called “limb darkening” that happens when relatively cool solar gas absorbs more than it emits.
The prominences are easy to see on the edge, the leaping plasma standing out against the sky, but if you look at the lighter streaks on the face, those are also prominences.
Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Friedman (Averted Imagination)
(via Solar purrominence | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
Yes, that cat-looking solar prominence is from Alan Friedman, who seems to be getting all the best pictures of ionized gasses flowing along magnetic force lines on the sun.
For a size reminder, here’s the same picture with Earth at relative size:
Yup, that’s an 80,000 kilometer kitty cat.
(via Gorgeous flowing plasma fountain erupts from the Sun | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
Only a middle-sized M-class flare here (the X-class one recently is what caused a whole lot of aurorae here on Earth), but to give you an idea of how the Sun kills most concepts of “scale”, the amount of energy in this “meh” (for the Sun) M-class flare is still more powerful than the combined nuclear weaponry of every nation on Earth. That is one powerful force.
So, put that video up to 720p or 1080p, run it full screen and remember that every frame of video is a minute of exposure time, so this is 3 hours of activity compressed.
Phil guesses that the gas jet and material being thrown off the surface is about 100,000 kilometers long. Note that the material doesn’t fall down ballistically, like you would see if something was suddenly chucked into the air here on Earth. The material itself is ionized in the flare eruption, so it is particularly attuned to the Sun’s magnetic field, making the path back down to the surface less of a “fall” and more of a “flow” along magnetic lines of force.
Truly awesome footage from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory.
(via APOD: 2011 September 18 - A Sharp View of the Sun)
It helps to operate a solar-specific telescope on the Canary Islands, but you also need a bunch of image-processing to help counter atmospheric effects…but if you’re patient, and determined, and in this case are the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, you can get a high-resolution, high-detailed image of a sunspot (big black thing at the bottom) and boiling granules (corn-kernel looking things at the top) from the sun’s surface.
Excuse me while I sit and stare at plasma-flows for a while…
(via The delicate tendrils of a solar dragon | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
Filtering for warm hydrogen and flipping the color of the Sun’s disk allows a photographer to capture a lot of the contrast with the activity on the corona. In this case, a solar prominence throws a hundred billion tons of matter off the surface along magnetic field lines and creates this dragon-like effect.
(via Solar storm tracked all the way from the Sun to Earth | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine)
So, when you’ve got two satellites running ahead of and behind Earth in orbit, namely Stereo-A and Stereo-B, you can get a fuller picture of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), as they move through the solar system, impacting Earth’s magnetic field on the way. Using some advanced data processing, NASA helioscientists have now been able to track the movements of these particles out from the Sun all the way to Earth.
Here’s a great still from the video, with Phil’s annotation showing the CME moving out through various “layers” of space between the Sun and the Earth:
Maybe I should have been a plasma physicist. This is awesome.
