The Sun Gets Active Again

By Mike on March 19, 2010 at 12:33 pm | In Blog Posts | No Comments

This is a solar image from St. Patrick’s Day sent in by one of our Slacker friends, Glen Ward. You can clearly see a solar prominence in profile here. A prominence is usually in the form of a large, bright loop extending outward from the Sun’s surface into the corona. A prominence forms in about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months. A typical prominence extends over many thousands of kilometers; the largest ever observed by SOHO was in 1997. It was an awesome 350,000 km long.

There is a lot we don’t know about the Sun. Scientists are currently researching how and why prominences are formed. NASA recently launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the Sun in more detail than ever before. You can read more about the Sun and SDO in this Simostronomy blog.