Oct 30, 2010: Sun Farts

[xoxoxoBruce]

Tomorrow being Halowe'en, when you'll be out howling at the moon, today we'll look at the sun.
Well not directly 'cause you'd burn your eyes out... before you even get that Christmas BB Gun. We'll look at a picture Alan Friedman took.

In this picture you can see sunspots, giant convection cells, and the gas that follows magnetic loops piercing the Sun’s surface. When we see them against the Sun’s surface they’re called filaments, and when they arc against the background sky on the edge of the Sun’s disk they’re called prominences.

The image he took is amazingly high-resolution! He has two closeups, one of the filament and sunspot near the edge of the disk on the left, and the other of prominences leaping up off the edge and silhouetted against the sky.

See that little bright spot on the plume on the left, just above the Sun’s edge? That spot is the same size as the Earth. The (inset) image to the right should make that fairly clear; I made the Earth pretty close to the right size for comparison. Our planet is about 13,000 km (8000 miles) in diameter, so that one minor prominence is roughly 50,000 km high. That’s 30,000 miles. And it’s positively dwarfed by the Sun itself. A million Earths could fit inside the Sun.

Since the Sun is so damn bright and far and wiggly, he must have used some gazillion dollar telescope on top of a mountain somewhere, right?

Nope, this is it.


link