The Sun’s just a boring old glowing ball in the sky, right?
So wrong.
Hello all, Amy here bringing you some sunlight on DNews.
Or at least, knowledge of it.
Recently, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took its 100 millionth observation of the
Sun and to celebrate, the mission team released a gallery of some of their favourite solar
images, and most of them don’t really look like the Sun we’re used to seeing.
Why is that?
So first off, it sort of goes without saying that you should NEVER look directly at the
Sun because it will seriously damage your eyes.
Always use eclipse glasses or special filters on a telescope or binoculars.
So if someone were to ask you what colour the Sun is, you would say yellow, right?
Well, the Sun looks yellow because of our atmosphere.
If you could look at the Sun in space, it would be a white ball.
But it doesn’t look like a boring old white ball in these pictures from SDO you say?
That’s because SDO can see far more than our eyes can.
The spacecraft has three instruments: the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager measures
the ripples and the magnetic field on the visible surface of the Sun; the Atmospheric
Imaging Assembly designed to measure the Sun’s atmosphere; and the Extreme Ultraviolet Variablity
Experiment tracks the extreme ultraviolet rays the Sun sends our way.
Not only do all these instruments look for different things, they look in different wavelengths
of light.
We see in visible light, which is a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
As lightwaves get longer you get into infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves.
On the long end, you get ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays.
So each instrument on SDO sees in various wavelengths.
But that’s not all.
Since it launched on February 11, 2010, SDO has captured some incredible occurrences up
close and in varying wavelengths, like coronal mass ejections which are massive bursts of
solar wind and magnetic fields rising above the corona.
And when you take all these observations and put them together, adding the x-ray observations
of coronal activity with infrared and x-ray data, you get these amazing, exciting pictures
that show just how dynamic our Sun really is!
So, will you look (indirectly of course) at the Sun differently now?
Let us know in the comments below or you can catch me on Twitter as @astVintageSpace.
And don’t forget to subscribe for more DNews every day of the week.