Stunning NASA Image Lets You Watch the Sun Explode in Real Time
By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | August 17, 2018 04:22pm ET
- click for image -
Don't be alarmed, but the sun is constantly exploding. While violent nuclear fusion reactions power the sun's 27-million-degree-Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius) core, towers of molten plasma, crackling radiation and electromagnetic energy rise and fall from the star's blazing surface in a constant tangle of heat and light.
It's pretty cool and almost completely invisible to human eyes. Thankfully, researchers at NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory have used computer models to capture snapshots of this unseen solar energy every day. Yesterday (Aug. 16), they shared one of those snapshots, which you can see above. [Sun Storms: Incredible Photos of Solar Flares]
In the computer-enhanced ultraviolet photo, you can see a model of the sun's magnetic-field lines swirling out of the star's surface the way they appeared on Aug. 10, 2018. Each white line represents a powerful electromagnetic eruption resulting from high-energy interactions between the ultrahot, supercharged particles that make up both the sun's magnetic field and the plasma writhing around the star's surface.
As you can see from the image, some of those streams of energy blast far into space, creating solar winds and other space weather, while others rise from the sun's surface, spin around and fall back down again in closed loops. These returning loops of magnetic energy can further stir the pot of charged particles on the sun's surface, resulting in more and greater explosions of solar weather, including solar flares and big belches of radiation known as coronal mass ejections.
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