Solar Facts and Space Weather
Sunspot group AR11429! Here is a look at AR11429 from Friday to today showing the 2 M-class and 1 X-class flare blasting away from the Sun. In addition to those events and their associated CMEs there is a lot of activity from the active region and the area surrounding it. This video is a composite [...]
A solar flare, coronal wave, filament eruption, coronal rain & a coronal mass ejection (CME)!
The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft observed as a photogenic, solar prominence erupted and broke out into space over about 18-hour period (May 13, 2011). Prominences, notoriously unstable structures, are cooler clouds of gas that float above the Sun’s surface, tethered there by magnetic forces. They often erupt and race into space like this one did. The [...]
The Sun is really really big! It is difficult to get a true feel for how big it is because nothing in our daily life comes even close. But we can use objects that we are familiar with to provide us with a scale that can allow us to at least see how big the [...]
We have reached the milestone of 1000 Fans on our FaceBook page! As promised, we have been preparing a small treat for all of you as a sign of appreciation for making the TheSunToday page such a great success in such a relatively short space of time. We have compiled a collection of our favorite [...]
A very long solar filament that had been snaking around the Sun erupted (Dec. 6, 2010) with a flourish. STEREO (Behind) caught the action in dramatic detail in extreme ultraviolet light of Helium. It had been almost a million km long (about half a solar radius) and a prominent feature on the Sun visible over [...]
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory or SOHO is by many accounts the granddaddy of modern solar astronomy. SOHO is not the first space based solar observatory but it has truly ushered in a golden age for solar physics. The mission had a primary science phase of 2 years and a overall mission lifetime of 5 [...]
On this day in 2003 (October 28), the Sun unleashed one of the largest and most geoeffective solar storms of the modern age (and consequently, one of the most studied). The eruption was part of what became known as the Halloween storms; two weeks in October and November of that year when two massive sunspot [...]
A giant filament on the sun produced a small eruption and flare.
The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft caught this tumultuous solar prominence as it twisted and turned over about 18 hours, as seen in profile above the Sun?s surface, before disappearing (Oct. 8, 2010). The cloud of cooler gases, suspended by magnetic forces, is seen here in extreme ultraviolet wavelength at about 60,000 degrees C. Other plasma also [...]
