Our Sun is a maelstrom of light and heat, a constant battlefield for plasma and magnetic fields. This recent prominence, captured by Andrea Vanoni and others, bore a striking triangular Keep reading
Tag: solar dynamics
The Solar Corona in Detail
The sun’s corona — its outer atmosphere — is usually impossible to see, since it’s far outshone by the rest of the sun. But during a total solar eclipse, the Keep reading
Solar Filament Eruption
From Earth, we rarely glimpse the violent flows of our home star. Here, a filament erupts from the photosphere creating a coronal mass ejection, captured in ultraviolet wavelengths by the Keep reading
A Shallow Origin for the Sun’s Magnetic Field
The Sun‘s complex magnetic field drives its 11-year solar activity cycle in ways we have yet to understand. During active periods, more sunspots appear, along with roiling flows within the Keep reading
The Solar Corona in Stunning Detail
The ESA’s Solar Orbiter captured this beautifully detailed video of our sun‘s corona last September. The Solar Orbiter took this footage from about 43 million kilometers away, a third of Keep reading
Kelvin-Helmholtz and the Sun
Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) are a favorite among fluid dynamicists. They resemble the curls of a breaking ocean wave — not a coincidence, since KHI create those ocean waves to begin Keep reading
Solar Coronal Heating
Our Sun‘s visible surface, the photosphere, is about 5800 Kelvin, but the temperature of the wispy corona is far hotter, reaching a million Kelvin in some places. Why the corona Keep reading
“Fusion of Helios”
Built from approximately 90,000 individual images, “Fusion of Helios” reveals the wisp-like corona of our Sun. Astrophotographers Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel joined forces to combine eclipse images with data Keep reading
Escaping the Sun
One enduring mystery of the solar wind — a stream of high-energy particles expelled from the sun — is how the particles get accelerated in the first place. The sun Keep reading
Brilliant Auroras
Glowing auroras billow across Canada in this satellite image from a recent geomagnetic storm. As our sun enters a more active part of its solar cycle, we can expect more Keep reading