The Beauty of the Sun – Spectacular Nasa Visuals

Published on Feb 11, 2015
February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

In honor of SDO’s fifth anniversary, NASA has released a video showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun’s surface.

The imagery is an example of the kind of data that SDO provides to scientists. By watching the sun in different wavelengths – and therefore different temperatures – scientists can watch how material courses through the corona, which holds clues to what causes eruptions on the sun, what heats the sun’s atmosphere up to 1,000 times hotter than its surface, and why the sun’s magnetic fields are constantly on the move.

Five years into its mission, SDO continues to send back tantalizing imagery to incite scientists’ curiosity. For example, in late 2014, SDO captured imagery of the largest sun spots seen since 1995 as well as a torrent of intense solar flares. Solar flares are bursts of light, energy and X-rays. They can occur by themselves or can be accompanied by what’s called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, in which a giant cloud of solar material erupts off the sun, achieves escape velocity and heads off into space. In this case, the sun produced only flares and no CMEs, which, while not unheard of, is somewhat unusual for flares of that size. Scientists are looking at that data now to see if they can determine what circumstances might have led to flares eruptions alone.

Goddard built, operates and manages the SDO spacecraft for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living with a Star Program. The program’s goal is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Avatar of Planetary Paul
    Planetary Paul

    We’re lucky there isn’t much of an atmosphere between us and the Sun, keeping us in the quiet. The sound of those explosions would vaporise us.

    1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
      Erich Vieth

      Fascinating thought, Planetary. Now you have me wondering. What if there WERE air between us and the sun. Just how loud would those explosions sound 93,000,000 miles away? I saw a calculation that traveling at the speed of sound, the sounds of those explosions would arrive at Earth about 13.8 years after the events.

  2. Avatar of Planetary Paul
    Planetary Paul

    Indeed, I forgot about the Inverse-square law and if there would be an atmosphere, what thickness would it have to have to enable propagation of the kind that results in destructive effects here. Then again that may not matter, as moving at our current orbital velocity through the proposed thick solar atmosphere would probably strip the planet bare and decay our orbit rapidly, plunging us into the Sun fairly quickly.

    Hm, I hope I don’t blow us to Kingdom Come, while I’m figuring out how to blow us to Kingdom Come……*

    *paraphrasing Lt. La Forge

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