NASA Sees Giant Solar Wave Erupt from the Sun
The sun celebrated May Day with a spectacular solar eruption Wednesday, unleashing a colossal wave of super-hot plasma captured on camera by a NASA spacecraft.
The solar eruption occurred over a 2.5-hour period Wednesday (May 1) and appeared as a “gigantic rolling wave” on the sun in a video recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, agency officials said in an image description. The solar eruption is what scientists call a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a type of sun storm that can fire off billions of tons of solar material at more than a million miles per hour, they added.When aimed directly at Earth, the most powerful CME events can pose a risk to satellites and astronauts in orbit, as well as interfere with communications and navigation networks. They can even damage ground-based power infrastructure.
But the May Day solar eruption occurred on the side of the sun and was not aimed at Earth, NASA officials said. It produced a dazzlingly bright wave of plasma that expanded from the sun’s surface and then erupted from the sun’s side, or limb, into open space.
The sun is currently in an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and is expected to reach its peak activity this year.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is one of several sun-watching spacecraft that keeps constant watch on Earth’s nearest star to track solar weather patterns and storm events. The $850 million SDO mission launched in 2010 and records constant high-definition views of the sun in several different wavelengths, including the extreme ultraviolet range of the light spectrum used to make the video of the May 1 solar eruption.
Coronal Helix
An unusual helix-shaped coronal mass ejection was observed by a NASA spacecraft in June 1998. The main body of the sun—outlined in white—is blocked by a coronagraph.
Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are mammoth clouds of charged particles that get hurled through the sun’s atmosphere at millions of miles an hour. A CME contains billions of tons of charged particles and can expand until it’s larger than the sun itself.
Credit: LASCO
Coronal Helix
An unusual helix-shaped coronal mass ejection was observed by a NASA spacecraft in June 1998. The main body of the sun—outlined in white—is blocked by a coronagraph.
Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are mammoth clouds of charged particles that get hurled through the sun’s atmosphere at millions of miles an hour. A CME contains billions of tons of charged particles and can expand until it’s larger than the sun itself.
Credit: LASCO
“The Hinode telescope captures some amazing views of last week’s annular solar eclipse.
Last week’s annular solar eclipse was only visible from cruises in the Pacific Ocean, but the international fleet of solar-observing spacecraft had a great view. The Hinode telescope, which orbits Earth and observes the sun in X-ray, optical, and extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, captured several eerie views of the event on Friday.
It wasn’t an annular eclipse from orbit, however: The moon just skims the sun from Hinode’s perspective. The telescope passed through the eclipse path four times, because Hinode loops Earth about every hour and a half. But it only captured three of the four eclipses, because in one of the orbits, both the Earth and moon were blocking the sun, according to Patrick McCauley, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
That is also why this view is truncated halfway through:
See an awesome time-lapse video of a lunar eclipse here.”
Cape York Annular Eclipse
Image Credit & Copyright: Courtesy Cameron McCarty -
MWV Observatory, Coca-Cola Space Science Center, Columbus State Univ. Eclipse TeamExplanation: This week the shadow of the New Moon fell on planet Earth, crossing Queensland’s Cape York in northern Australia … for the second time in six months. On the morning of May 10, the Moon’s apparent size was too small to completely cover the Sun though, revealing a “ring of fire” along the central path of the annular solar eclipse. Near mid-eclipse from Coen, Australia, a webcast team captured this telescopic snapshot of the annular phase. Taken with a hydrogen-alpha filter, the dramatic image finds the Moon’s silhouette just within the solar disk, and the limb of the active Sun spiked with solar prominences. Still, after hosting back-to-back solar eclipses, northern Australia will miss the next and final solar eclipse of 2013. This November, a rare hybrid eclipse will track across the North Atlantic and equatorial Africa.
Nasa Apod 11 May 2013
The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 1:32 pm EDT on May 3, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation.
Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, and the radio blackout for this flare has already subsided.
This flare is classified as an M5.7-class flare. M-class flares are the weakest flares that can still cause some space weather effects near Earth.
Increased numbers of flares are quite common at the moment, as the sun’s normal 11-year activity cycle is ramping up toward solar maximum, which is expected in late 2013.
(via nerdsmorgsboard)
Sunsets, Dancing Auroras, Eclipses, Sun Trails & Comets - Mesmerizing Sky Photography of Juan Carlos Casado — Tierra y Estrellas
(Source: kenobi-wan-obi)
(Source: farm3.staticflickr.com, via sagansense)
SOLAR SPIT An image captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a blast of plasma streaming from the Sun in August 2012. Scientists say a solar eruption was detected on Tuesday and was headed toward Mars. When reached for comment, Mars said “Tell the Sun to come at me, bro.” (Photo: NASA via the AP / Wall Street Journal)
Solar Cycle Update: Twin Peaks?
Something unexpected is happening on the sun. 2013 is supposed to be the year of Solar Max, the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. Yet 2013 has arrived and solar activity is relatively low. Sunspot numbers are well below their values in 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent for many months.
The quiet has led some observers to wonder if forecasters missed the mark. Solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center has a different explanation:
“This is solar maximum,” he suggests. “But it looks different from what we expected because it is double peaked.”
Nine Views
Nine Views (Croatian: Devet pogleda) is an ambiental installation in Zagreb, Croatia which, together with the sculpture Prizemljeno Sunce (The Grounded Sun), makes up a consistent model of solar system.
Prizemljeno Sunce by Ivan Kožarić was first displayed in 1971 by the building of the Croatian National Theatre, and since then changed location a few times. Since 1994 it has been situated in the Bogovićeva Street. It is simply a bronze sphere around 2 metres in diameter.
In 2004, artist Davor Preis had a two-week exhibition in the Josip Račić Exhibition Hall in Margaretska Street in Zagreb, and afterwards he placed 9 models of the planets of the solar system around Zagreb, to complete a model of the entire solar system. The models’ sizes as well as their distances from the Prizemljeno Sunce are all in the same scale as the Prizemljeno Sunce itself.
Preis did this installation with very little or no publicity, so his installation isn’t well known among citizens of Zagreb. On a few occasions individuals or small groups of people, particularly physics students, “discovered” that there was a model of the solar system in Zagreb. One of the earliest efforts to find all of the planets was started in November 2004 on the web forum of the student section of Croatian Physics Society.
The locations of the planets are as follows:
- Mercury - 3 Margaretska Street
- Venus - 3 Ban Josip Jelačić Square
- Earth - 9 Varšavska Street
- Mars - 21 Tkalčićeva Street
- Jupiter - 71 Voćarska Street
- Saturn - 1 Račićeva Street
- Uranus - 9 Siget
- Neptune - Kozari Way
- Pluto - Bologna Alley (underpass) - included in the installation before being demoted to dwarf planet
NASA’s Mars Spacecraft Go Solo Next Month
An unfavorable planetary alignment will force NASA’s fleet of robotic Mars explorers to be a lot more self-sufficient next month.
Mission controllers won’t send any commands to the agency’s various Mars spacecraft for much of April, because the sun will lie between Earth and the Red Planet during that time. Our star can disrupt and degrade interplanetary communications in such an alignment, which is known as a Mars solar conjunction, so spacecraft handlers won’t take any chances.“Receiving a partial command could confuse the spacecraft, putting them in grave danger,” NASA officials explain in a video posted Tuesday (March 19) by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
Transmissions from Earth to the Mars rover Curiosity are slated to be suspended from April 4 to May 1, officials said. No commands will be sent to Curiosity’s older rover cousin Opportunity or NASA’s Mars-orbiting craft — Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — from April 9 to April 26.
Both rovers will continue to do stationary science work throughout the conjunction period, relying on commands sent up to them beforehand.
“We are doing extra science planning work this month to develop almost three weeks of activity sequences for Opportunity to execute throughout conjunction,” Opportunity mission manager Alfonso Herrera of JPL said in a statement.
MRO and Mars Odyssey will continue science observations as well, though on a more limited basis. The orbiters will also continue their role as rover communication links, receiving data from Opportunity and Curiosity.
Odyssey will send information — its own observations and the rovers’ data — Earthward throughout the conjunction period, though the mission team anticipates some dropouts, so Odyssey will send the data again later as needed.
MRO will take a different tack, storing everything from April 4 until after conjunction. The spacecraft’s operators estimate it will have about 52 gigabits of data onboard when it’s cleared to transmit to Earth again on May 1.
Mars solar conjunctions occur every 26 months, so all of the spacecraft have dealt with them except Curiosity, which landed on the Red Planet last August. Opportunity has been through five conjunctions since arriving on Mars in January 2004, but Odyssey is even more experienced.
“This is our sixth conjunction for Odyssey,” Chris Potts of JPL said in a statement. Potts is mission manager for Odyssey, which has been orbiting Mars since 2001. “We have plenty of useful experience dealing with them, though each conjunction is a little different.”
How Do Aurorae (Northern and Southern Lights) Occur?
As solar particles from an incoming Coronal Mass Ejection (or CME) move into Earth’s magnetosphere they travel around to its back side — or night side, since it is on the opposite side from the Sun — along the magnetic field lines.
When these magnetic field lines reconnect in an area known as the magnetotail, energy is released and it sends the particles down onto Earth’s poles, and sometimes even lower latitudes. As the particles bombard oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, the atoms release a photon of light that we see as the beautiful colors of the aurora.
(via: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory)
NASA’s SDO Shows A Little Rain On the Sun
“Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.
On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun’s lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays — a phenomenon known as coronal rain.
Over the course of the next day, hot plasma in the corona cooled and condensed along strong magnetic fields in the region. Magnetic fields, themselves, are invisible, but the charged plasma is forced to move along the lines, showing up brightly in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 304 Angstroms, which highlights material at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. This plasma acts as a tracer, helping scientists watch the dance of magnetic fields on the sun, outlining the fields as it slowly falls back to the solar surface.
The footage in this video was collected by the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s AIA instrument. SDO collected one frame every 12 seconds, and the movie plays at 30 frames per second, so each second in this video corresponds to 6 minutes of real time. The video covers 12:30 a.m. EDT to 10:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2012.
Music: “Thunderbolt” by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of artist.”
Learn more about this event here.
