Brains
NASA just released this spectacular 5-year timelapse of our sun. They clearly hired someone very good to edit this video and make it pop. Watching Coronal Mass Ejections in fast forward to great music is something special. This video will remind you just how small we are and just how dependent we are on this thing: the sun. The sun is the reason for all life on Earth and the energy source that keeps us thriving. Its great to take a step back and appreciate this raging power plant of our solar system.
SUN FACTS:
– It takes 100,000 years for a photo to get from the center of the Sun to the surface of the sun, then takes 8 minutes to reach Earth
– 1 million Earths could fit inside the Sun
– The sun is 99.86% of the mass of the solar system
– The sun is the closest thing to a perfect sphere that we’ve ever observed in nature
– The sun is half way through it’s life – It’s 4.5 billion years old and is estimated to live another 5 billion years
– The center of the Sun is 15 million degrees Celsius, hot enough to convert hydrogen to helium (a nuclear reaction)
NASA:
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.
