A large solar flare occurred
on 10 September 2017 at
the edge of the Sun, and this movie shows the spectacular eruption that
came from the flare. The images show plasma at a temperature of about
10 million
degrees, and the flare is the extremely bright feature just above the
edge of the Sun. The loop-like structure being ejected is referred to
as a magnetic flux rope. The thin, straight line behind it is a current
sheet (viewed edge on). Both features are as expected from the standard
model of solar eruptive events, and this is a particularly nice
example.
Images are from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly of
NASA's
Solar Dynamics Observatory. The sequence lasts 10 minutes (see time in
bottom-right corner). I've rotated the images by 90 degrees
counter-clockwise. The flickering of the bright flare is due to the
camera taking alternating short and long exposures.
I
took this picture of the James Webb Space Telescope on 26-Apr-2017 as
it was in the NASA-Goddard clean room. The telescope underwent some
tests at Goddard and is about to be shipped to the Johnson Space
Center. Note the segmented mirror, and the three side segments that are
folded back. The people in the bottom right give an idea of how big the
mirror is.
This image was obtained by the IRIS spacecraft on 30 August
2013. It's not a regular image as time is along the X-axis and what is
seen is the change over 50 minutes in the brightness of a narrow
section of the Sun that is 17,000 km long (almost 1.5 times the
diameter of the Earth). The location is just to the north of a sunspot,
which is the dark area at the bottom of the image, and light comes
from ionized magnesium at a temperature of about 10,000 K. The dark
cloud-like features are
material that rises and falls to the Sun's surface. Note the faint
vertical striations across the image - I don't know what these are!
The left panel shows AIA 171 angstrom images for a
sunspot observed on
3-Oct-2014, showing loops at about 800,000 K. The right panel shows
images from the IRIS Slit-Jaw Imager at 1400 angstroms, showing
emission around 80,000 K. Many loops are rooted in the sunspot's
umbra, and the bases of the loops are seen to oscillate with a period
of about 3 minutes.
