NASA SDO - Departing Sunspots, June 18-19, 2012 (by LittleSDOHMI)

Over the past two weeks we have been watching the Active Region 1504 appear on the Eastern limb of the Sun, release several M-class solar flares while moving across the Earth facing side of the Sun. As it is decaying and moving towards the Western limb of the Sun, we are getting one good last look at these beautiful sunspots.

This video covers almost 26 hours from June 18 at 8:44 UT to June 19, 10:34 UT.

Credit: NASA SDO

Source: youtube.com

NASA | Dynamic Earth (by NASAexplorer)

Watch as this NASA animation shows the sun blasting out a giant explosion of magnetic energy called a coronal mass ejection and the Earth being shielded from this by its powerful magnetic field. The sun also continuously showers the Earth with light and radiation energy. Much of this solar energy is deflected by the Earth’s atmosphere or reflected back into space by clouds, ice and snow. What gets through becomes the energy that drives the Earth system, powering a remarkable planetary engine — the climate.

The unevenness of this solar heating, the cycles of day and night, and our seasons are part of what cause wind currents to circulate around the word. These winds drive surface ocean currents and in this animation you can view these currents flowing off the coast of Florida.

This animation connects for the first time a series of computer models. The view of the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field comes from the Luhmann-Friesen magnetic field model and two models that incorporated data from a real coronal mass ejection from the sun on December 2006.

NASA’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at Goddard Space Flight Center, a multi-agency partnership that provides information on space weather to the international research community, generated these two models. The ENLIL model is a time-dependent 3-D magnetohydrodynamic model of the heliosphere and shows changes in the particles flows and magnetic fields.
The BATS-R-US model is also a magnetohydrodynamic model of plasma from solar wind moving through the Earth’s magnetic dipole field. It uses measurements of solar wind density, velocity, temperature and magnetic field by NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite, which launched in August of 1997 and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), two satellites that view the structure and evolution of solar storms.

The view of the Earth’s atmosphere comes from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA), a computer model that uses data from the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System Version 5 (GEOS-5) and incorporates information gathered from ground stations, operational satellites and NASA’s Earth-observing fleet of satellites. The model for the ocean is the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2), a joint project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Ca.

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11003

Source: youtube.com

NASA SDO - “Alien” Prominence, June 18, 2012 (by LittleSDOHMI)

This movie covers almost 15 hours from the early hours of June 18, 2012. These UV views from the AIA instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in the 304 angstrom wavelengths show a beautiful prominence eruption. We called it the “Alien Prometheus Prominence”. Why? Watch the movie and find out.

This 304 angstrom channel (red Sun) provides us a very good way of seeing areas where cooler dense plumes of plasma, filaments and prominences, are located above the visible surface of the Sun.

There is a also a close-up view in 171 angstrom of this prominence showing the arcs extending off of the Sun where plasma moves along magnetic field lines.

A solar prominence (also known as a filament when viewed against the solar disk) is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun’s surface. Prominences are anchored to the Sun’s surface in the photosphere, and extend outwards into the Sun’s hot outer atmosphere, called the corona. A prominence forms over timescales of about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months, looping hundreds of thousands of miles into space. Scientists are still researching how and why prominences are formed.

The red-glowing looped material is plasma, a hot gas comprised of electrically charged hydrogen and helium. The prominence plasma flows along a tangled and twisted structure of magnetic fields generated by the sun’s internal dynamo. An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma.

Credit: NASA SDO
Scoring: Alien - by Jerry Goldsmith

PS: We are not endorsing any aliens on the Sun!

Source: youtube.com

NASA | Massive Solar Flare gets HD Close Up (by NASAexplorer)

Take a closer look at the flare that erupted on March 6, 2012.


This movie of the March 6, 2012 X5.4 flare was captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in the 171 and 131 Angstrom wavelength. One of the most dramatic features is the way the entire surface of the sun seems to ripple with the force of the eruption. This movement comes from something called EIT waves — because they were first discovered with the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on the Solar Heliospheric Observatory. Since SDO captures images every 12 seconds, it has been able to map the full evolution of these waves and confirm that they can travel across the full breadth of the sun. The waves move at over a million miles per hour, zipping from one side of the sun to the other in about an hour. The movie shows two distinct waves. The first seems to spread in all directions; the second is narrower, moving toward the southeast. Such waves are associated with, and perhaps trigger, fast coronal mass ejections, so it is likely that each one is connected to one of the two CMEs that erupted on March 6.


Caption: NASA/SDO




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Source: youtube.com

NASA | Biggest Solar Storm Since 2005 (by NASAexplorer)

The sun erupted late on January 22, 2012 with an M8.7 class flare, an earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), and a burst of fast moving, highly energetic protons known as a “solar energetic particle” event. The latter has caused the strongest solar radiation storm since September 2005 according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

NASA’s Goddard Space Weather Center’s models predict that the CME is moving at almost 1,400 miles per second, and could reach Earth’s magnetosphere — the magnetic envelope that surrounds Earth — as early as tomorrow, Jan 24 at 9 AM ET (plus or minus 7 hours). This has the potential to provide good auroral displays, possibly at lower latitudes than normal.

What is a CME? Learn more here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/spaceweather/index.html

Source: youtube.com

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