NASA SDO captures long solar filament

Credit: SDO

A very long filament hung across the sun’s surface for over a week from July 31 to Aug. 6, 2014.

The filament appears as the dark line going diagonally across the center of the sun in this image.

Filaments consist of clouds of cooler gas raised above the sun’s surface by magnetic forces.

Normally they exhibit a great deal of instability and break apart in days or even hours.

This image was obtained in the 191 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light, and has been tinted red instead of the usual brown colour.

NASA SDO: Solar Filament Eruption Creates 'Canyon of Fire'

A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. 

The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. 

The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. 

In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields.

These images were captured on Sept. 29-30, 2013, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which constantly observes the sun in a variety of wavelengths.

Different wavelengths help capture different aspect of events in the corona. The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. 

The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun's magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption.

The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious.

By comparing this with the other colours, one sees that the two swirling ribbons moving farther away from each other are, in fact, the footprints of the giant magnetic field loops, which are growing and expanding as the filament pulls them upward.

Image Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory

Recent Solar Filament Creates Northern Lights over Canada [PHOTO]

Swirls of green and red appear in an aurora over Whitehorse, Yukon on the night of September 3, 2012. 

The aurora was due to the interaction of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun with Earth's magnetosphere. 

The CME left the sun on August 31 and arrived on September 3.

Credit: David Cartier, Sr./NASA

Beautiful swirls of green and red lights appeared in the sky over Whitehorse, a town in the Canadian territory of Yukon, on the night of 3 September.

The lights were caused by a whip-like solar filament, ejected as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The phenomenon did not connect with the Earth directly but glanced off the planet's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere.

The CME erupted on the surface of the Sun on 31 August and travelled towards Earth at a speed of more than 900 miles per second, according to NASA. In March 2010, a solar filament loop that erupted on the Sun's surface was as large as the circumference of the Earth.

The filament touched the magnetosphere a mere three days later - the distance between the planet and the Sun is roughly 149,785,000km - causing phenomenon called the Aurora Borealis (also known as the Northern Lights) to appear over Whitehorse.

Auroras are actually energy released in the form of colorful lights and are seen in skies at dusk.
 

NASA SDO Image: Gigantic Solar filament eruption

NASA SDO observed today's gigantic solar filament eruption.

Credit: NASA SDO

Solar filament extends over half a million miles

The sun isn't about just heat and fire. It's also about texture, variegated colours and occasional violent outbursts.

Here, a whip-like solar filament extends over half a million miles in a long arc above the sun’s surface.

Filaments are exceedingly hot ionized gasses that are magnetically anchored to the sun's photosphere.

Viewed against the blackness of space, they're very bright and are known as prominences.

Viewed with the sun itself as a backdrop, they appear darker since they're cooler than the overall solar mass. That more-modest appearance also earns them a more modest name.

A more recent and much larger Solar Filament eruption is shown below.

  This image was captured by the NASA SDO.