Massive Explosion on the Sun

NASA's Science News website today revealed some fabulous videos of an explosion on the sun that happened back in December.

Astronomers are calling the Japanese Hinode spacecraft a "Hubble for the sun." Watch this movie and you'll see why[.]

The footage, gathered by Hinode's Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) on Dec. 13, 2006, shows sunspot 930 unleashing a powerful X-class solar flare. It's one of the most detailed movies of a flare solar physicists have ever seen.

What makes Hinode truly special as a solar telescope "is its unique ability to see the sun's magnetic field," says John Davis, NASA's project scientist for Hinode at the Marshall Space Flight Center. It's an ability Hinode used to reveal the magnetic underpinnings of the Dec. 13th flare.

"Solar flares are essentially magnetic," Davis explains. In the maelstrom above a sunspot, lines of magnetic force are twisted and stretched until the tension reaches a certain point—and then the whole thing explodes.

A rubber band provides a good analogy. Take one from your desk, hold one end in each hand: stretch and twist. If you twist, twist and twist to extremes, the tormented band will eventually snap, painfully releasing all the energy you just put into it.

Magnetic fields behave a lot like rubber bands, and "Hinode was able to see the twisting and stretching that preceded the Dec. 13th solar flare," he says.

They've also got animation of the "rampaging hurricane" of the magnetic flare.

Astronomers have been struggling to predict solar flares since flares were discovered in 1859 by Lord R.C. Carrington and R. Hodgson. But they have been stymied, in part, by the difficulties of mapping the sun's magnetic field. Magnetograms on Earth must look through our planet's turbulent atmosphere, which blurs the little red arrows we see so clearly in the Hinode movie. Hinode's ability to examine magnetic fields from Earth orbit is a new and crucial development.

"The kind of data we're getting from Hinode is just what we need to sort out how flares work," says Davis. "All we need now is some more explosions."