Science Is Beautiful

Solar Eruptions: Sun As Never Seen Before

April 22, 2010

These are some of the first images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) which were released yesterday. The purpose of this mission is to study Sun better and understand how various activities on Sun affects our Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climatic processes. The images are simply breathtaking. The video above shows eruptions from the Sun’s surface, also called as solar prominence eruptions. These eruptions occur from the relatively cooler plasma clouds which are loosely held onto the Sun’s surface. These prominence eruptions can eject huge amounts of charged particles which in turn can affect the magnetic field in the sun’s neighborhood including Earth. We were all amazed by Earth’s volcanic activity in Iceland and now it’s time to see what our Sun has to offer and these first set of images from SDO didn’t disappoint. SDO also measured temperature of sun’s surface (ranging from 60,000 K- more than 1 million K) as well as the magnetic activity.

The above images were taken by Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on-board which has capability of taking images every 10 seconds on 10 different channels centered at different wavelength range. Of these 10 channels, 7 are in Extreme UltraViolet range while three are in UltraViolet-Visible range. Of the seven EUV wavelength channels, six are tuned to observe ionized Iron (Fe) which will be used to map the temperature of the Sun’s surface in the range of 1 Million K- 20 Million K. The above images were measured from the channel centered at 30.4 nm wavelength which is result of the emission from ionized Helium. Here are some more images:

Photo and Video Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio And Solar Dynamic Observatory

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5. Kepler Mission Finds A Hot And Rocky Expolanet

Filed under: Research,Science

Tags: NASA, Research, Science, Space