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David
Video: The Butterfly Effect on the Sun’s Surface
- By Lisa Grossman
- May 25, 2010 |
- 7:11 pm
New data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows that on the sun, little changes can have big consequences. High-resolution images of layers of the sun’s surface show how small flares can trigger larger flares and coronal mass ejections hundreds of thousands of miles away.
“We are in essence watching the butterfly effect on the sun,” said W. Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center at a press briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Miami on May 25.
The images were taken with SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, which takes images of the full disk of the sun at eight different temperatures from 10,000 to 36 million degrees Fahrenheit. They show a small flare in the right part of the screen, which sets off a magnetic instability that cascades across the surface of the sun at hundreds of thousands to millions of miles per hour. This wave builds as it travels, culminating in a flare that triggers a large loop of hot, charged plasma at the top left of the sun’s disk.
“For the first time, we’re beginning to be able to see these connections,” said Alan Title of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center. “We still don’t know how far these cascades go. AIA is showing us that these cascades in fact exist.”
Video: SDO/NASA/AIA consortium
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