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Search resuls for: "Solar Dynamics"


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The Northern Lights could appear in the skies over some northern US states on Friday. The lights could be dazzling thanks to solar winds blowing from a giant coronal hole on the sun. NOAA/Space Weather Prediction CenterThese solar winds are coming from a giant coronal hole on the sun. As that giant hole spread across the corona, it blasted strong, high-speed solar winds into space, in the direction of Earth. They have previously driven the aurora lights as far south as New York and Idaho.
The sun is sporting a giant coronal hole that could fit 20-30 Earths across, back-to-back. Coronal holes blast rapid solar winds into space that travel 500-800 kilometers per second. Coronal holes are cooler in temperature, so they don't glow as bright and therefore look black against the rest of the sun. In this case, the solar winds from this coronal hole are scheduled to reach Earth by the end of this week. But coronal holes — even large ones like this — are far less violent.
That motion, called convection, is what creates strong magnetic fields at the poles and smaller, local magnetic fields at the surface of the sun. That instability causes havoc in the magnetic fields at the surface of the sun, which become much more active. As the sun's local magnetic fields get more tangled and crash into each other, they can explode. The worst solar storm we've seen happened in 1859. But as SpaceX and NASA aim to ramp up missions in coming years, they will need to prepare for solar storms.
Video from a NASA telescope shows part of the sun breaking off and swirling around its north pole. More plasma is building up to liftoff at the sun's north pole, which is a once-a-decade event. She added that the telescope footage appeared to show a solar prominence — a large, bright filament extending out from the sun, but anchored to the solar surface. More extreme activity is building on the sun's north poleOn Friday morning, more plasma appeared to be swirling at the solar north pole. Cool plasma building at the surface of the sun's pole appears to be getting ready to lift off, or erupt, into space.
The sun can be seen 'smiling' in a new image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The "eyes" and "mouth" on the surface of the sun are coronal holes. The photo was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a program working to understand the changes in the Sun's radiation output. Today, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the Sun "smiling." "Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the Sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space."
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