Farside flares--more to come?

**American Patriot** · November 4th, 2010, 17:17

FARSIDE FLARES--MORE TO COME? An active sunspot is about to emerge over the sun's southeastern horizon. It announced itself yesterday with a C4-class flare that hurled material high above the stellar surface, shown here in a movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:

movie formats: 3.8 MB mpeg, 0.9 MB iPad, 0.3 MB iPhone

Although the explosion happened behind the limb of the sun, it nevertheless yielded enough x-radiation to produce a wave of ionization in Earth's upper atmosphere. Researcher Rob Stammes recorded a sudden ionospheric disturbance (SID) when the wave passed over his lab in Laukvik, Norway. (Learn more about SIDs here.) Without even showing itself, the sunspot is already geoeffective.

The source of this activity appears to be old active region 1112. It crossed the Earth-facing side of the sun back in October, a sunspot dragging a magnificent filament of magnetism behind it. Two weeks later, AR1112 t is coming around for a second pass. Yesterday's eruption may be read as "hello, I'm back." Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.

**American Patriot** · November 4th, 2010, 17:17

Wow.

**vector7** · November 4th, 2010, 18:13

Stunning new image of sun's surface covered in fiery 'tubes' of plasma

By David Derbyshire and Niall Firth
Last updated at 8:13 AM on 4th November 2010

With twirling patterns of orange, red and yellow, it looks like an undiscovered Van Gogh.

But this astonishing image is actually a close-up of the sun, showing the fiery jets of fast-moving superheated gas that constantly burst from the solar surface.

The twisting tubes, known as spicules, are around 300 miles in diameter and spurt upwards from the sun at supersonic speeds of 45,000mph. They can be likened to pipes of gas, each as wide as a small country and as long as half the Earth.

One of the highest resolution images yet of spicules which cover the solar active region 11092 that crossed the sun last month

The entire image covers a relatively tiny proportion of the sun’s surface, just 65,000 square miles. It was captured by Kevin Reardon, a space scientist at the Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri in Firenze, Italy.

More...

Incredible new image of the sun's atmosphere caught on camera by amateur astronomer

Awayf rom the spicules, the small, round dots in the image are the signature of sound waves buffeting the chromosphere from below.

At any one time there are around 60,000 to 70,000 active spicules on the sun; an individual spicule typically reaches around 5,000 miles above its surface.

Time-sequenced images have recently shown that spicules last about five minutes, starting out as tall tubes of rapidly rising gas but eventually fading as the gas peaks and falls back down to the sun.

What determines the creation and dynamics of spicules is still not fully understood.

Mr Reardon who captured this image and who is affiliated with the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen's University Belfast, said of his picture:

‘What is unique about this image is that we have managed to get high-resolution, not the very highest possible at this wavelength, but close, over an extended field of view.’

‘This is just a small piece of the full sun. It gives us an idea of the details of the individual structures, but also how they are then all interconnected or intertwined or woven together.’

He explained this is what lies between the solar photosphere, where sunspots can be seen, and the corona, with its magnetic arches stretching outward.

He added: ‘It's the enigmatic solar chromosphere, the region of the solar atmosphere where the magnetic field starts to dominate, forming long, thin, dense structures.'

**Toad** · November 4th, 2010, 19:09

You get such a sense of mind boggling nearly unrestrained power looking at those images. Makes me wonder how the heck we not only can live next to it, but we're alive because of it.