Comments on: The Sun

The Sun

grouse — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:33:37 -0800

By: oneirodynia

oneirodynia — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:39:00 -0800

The comet losing it's plasma tail is pretty amazing.

By: Caduceus

Caduceus — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:40:31 -0800

... is a mass of incandescent gas, A gigantic nuclear furnace, Where hydrogen is built into helium At a temperature of millions of degrees.

By: A dead Quaker

A dead Quaker — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:42:24 -0800

I was all set to snark but I leave in awe. Thanks for this.

By: scodger

scodger — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:42:24 -0800

Bostons big picture is pretty great, check out earth from above.

By: Caduceus

Caduceus — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:42:38 -0800

In all seriousness, though, what a cool page! Thanks for posting.

By: sien

sien — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:50:32 -0800

All this, and it manages to write a great newspaper.

By: Rhaomi

Rhaomi — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:50:34 -0800

Very, very cool. I always thought the final scene from Sunshine* was more fantasy than reality, but these pictures show the environments were pretty on the mark. * (starting at 5:10 -- I would have used Splicd, but embedding is disabled on that video.)

By: Static Vagabond

Static Vagabond — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:54:43 -0800

Mindblowing, truely-- I spent another twenty minutes reading up on the details of the sun after viewing those magnetic structures. And to think, we're trying to achieve something similar to that with JET and the upcoming ITER. Amazing.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:01:27 -0800

Picture 20 is from this video.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:12:16 -0800

wow. Seriously amazing. Those are the most intense photographs of the sun I've ever seen. Somehow they convey its power and magnitude. I love the "Detailed closeup of magnetic structures on the Sun's surface" image. This one looks like a scary eye. Adding to the sunniness, two of my faves: Fifth song down in Space Songs, Why does the Sun Shine l Walking on Sunshine.

By: Science!

Science! — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:16:34 -0800

President Lindberg: Steadert. General Staedert: Yes Sir! President Lindberg: I have a doubt. General Staedert: I don't, Mr. President.

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:17:46 -0800

Or, y'know, some Swans.

By: sexyrobot

sexyrobot — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:26:36 -0800

um...does it mean i'm a geek if i've seen all of these pictures before? 8\ it really is a monster, isn't it? it's basically a million-mile-wide ball of h-bombs thats been exploding for almost 5 billion years, and the only thing keeping it from going kablooie all over the place is its massive gravity. my faves here are the ones from the swedish solar telescope (which uses a vibrating rubber mirror to counteract blurring from convection in the earth's atmosphere) and the ones from TRACE...the animations of flares and active regions on the trace website are uh-mazing...

By: Artw

Artw — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:41:26 -0800

People in Boston know about this thuing and they haven't declared it a terrorist threta yet? Wow. SOmeone should flash it on and off, they'd go crazy.

By: illiad

illiad — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:42:40 -0800

Awesome photos. Also, I wanted to squeeze the spots on the Sun.

By: cowbellemoo

cowbellemoo — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:42:50 -0800

The cell-like appearance is formed by the multitude of small clusters of magnetic flux that are collected in the downflow regions of the supergranular network of convective motions. I've been telling them that for years!

By: birdsquared

birdsquared — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:51:31 -0800

Thanks - with all the election talk and economy worries, it's sometimes good to be reminded of how insignificant we are on a cosmic scale (from the text of Photo 17 : "it blasts more than a billion tons of matter out into space at millions of kilometers per hour.")

By: Galvatron

Galvatron — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:06:42 -0800

Wow, those are some fantastic visualizations. I'm especially struck by the imaging of magnetic structure, which I had never seen before.

By: speug

speug — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:14:45 -0800

Delightful post - great antidote to the economic and political shenanigans. Thank you...

By: mattoxic

mattoxic — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:24:51 -0800

They usually hang out in the cold, distant regions of the solar system, but occasionally a gravitational tug from a planet.... While I hang our in front of a 7-11

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:36:32 -0800

The "H-alpha wavelength"? Are we still at war with the Krull? Where's A. E. van Voigt when you need him? For us regular people, what's "H-alpha" in nanometers?

By: mattoxic

mattoxic — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:37:11 -0800

Great post, thanks heaps.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:37:27 -0800

Oops, van Vogt. Spell check first, post second.

By: dsword

dsword — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:37:41 -0800

Really great. Thank you so much!

By: grouse

grouse — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:50:26 -0800

For us regular people, what's "H-alpha" in nanometers? 656.281 nm.

By: codswallop

codswallop — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:23:43 -0800

Awesome stuff. Thank you for posting it. The part about solar winds being their lowest in 50 years makes me grin. How long have we been measuring that particular datum? About 50 years, I think.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:29:08 -0800

Great images...but the comments section on that page starts getting a bit fucking weird towards the bottom...

By: grounded

grounded — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:01:55 -0800

Oh. That sun. But a Page 3 Lovely nonetheless.

By: Joseph Gurl

Joseph Gurl — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:15:23 -0800

Better than Sunn 0))) Beautiful, actually. Thanks.

By: basicchannel

basicchannel — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:19:59 -0800

50. Maybe Bill Belichick ate the sun spots by Anonymous October 13, 08 05:02 PM It is true, Bill Belichick IS fat.

By: nicolin

nicolin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:30:01 -0800

Beautiful. Thank you.

By: clearly

clearly — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:12:37 -0800

What's you favorite planet? Mine's the Sun. Always has been. It's like the King of planets. /Harry Caray.

By: flashboy

flashboy — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:19:42 -0800

Awesome stuff. And it didn't even include this one, which remains just about one of the awesomest pictures ever.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:00:51 -0800

This movie, Sunshine. I missed it. I checked out IMDB, and found no mention of Heinlein, who I believe wrote the original story. Am I mistaken? I know I read such a tale, right down to a different version of the closing lines ("I come back to you, in the sunshine"). The photos are, literally, awesome. I hope we learn to bottle that stuff up!

By: TedW

TedW — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:06:00 -0800

Flashboy, I was just coming to link that; glad to see someone else has seen that one. Great post, grouse!.

By: cashman

cashman — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:36:08 -0800

Not to be forgotten, the Big Picture is by metafilter's own kokogiak.

By: erpava

erpava — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:58:25 -0800

Ra Ra Ra!

By: caddis

caddis — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:43:12 -0800

What a welcome retreat from all the politics and financial doom and gloom. Great post.

By: dseaton

dseaton — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:00:46 -0800

Picture 16 misidentifies this prominence (or filament) eruption that actually happened on 19 July 2000, and from the caption you'd never know how really really interesting a shot it is. I used to work on the TRACE mission, so I've spent a lot of time looking at pictures like these and this event happens to be an all-time favorite of mine because it provides a really dramatic example of how important a role magnetic fields play in the dynamics of the solar corona. Somewhere I have a movie version of that photo, but I can't find it. But here's a movie of a very similar event from 27 May 2002. What's happening in both the picture and the movie is that stress on a coil of magnetic field (what people call a magnetic flux rope) causes it to suddenly kink, not unlike what happens when you really twist up a rope. In some cases, the lines of magnetic field will literally break, leading to a topological reconfiguration (which is called magnetic reconnection) and, probably, a solar flare. But here, there's no reconnection, so we don't get a flare. Instead, all this million degree plasma gets flung up into the corona. Some of the plasma attached to this field gets heated up in the process, which is what causes it to brighten. As this plasma cools, it condenses and drops out of the satellite's passband, so it disappears. The most dense condensations are opaque, and show up as the dark blobs in the movie and picture. All this plasma is stuck to lines of magnetic field like beads on a wire, so, with nowhere else to go, it drains back down the legs of these loops of magnetic field. In the movie you can see really clearly how the stuff isn't just falling straight down, it's flowing along field lines. When these things manage to reconnect and break free, you get a filament eruption and all this material gets flung out into space in a coronal mass ejection. But here, since it doesn't reconnect, you just get a series of loops that kink, heat up, and cool off. This is kind of analogous to the water cycle on earth, so people sometimes call the material draining down these loops coronal rain. Anyway, I just thought it might be nice to provide a little context for a cool photo that had a pretty boring description on the Globe's website. Solar physics doesn't have the glamor of planetary science of cosmology, so it's cool to see the Sun get the Big Picture treatment. Thanks for posting these photos.

By: The Card Cheat

The Card Cheat — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:25:54 -0800

> Very, very cool. I always thought the final scene from Sunshine* was more fantasy than reality, but these pictures show the environments were pretty on the mark. I really, really wanted to love Sunshine, and I did until the filmmakers decided to turn it into a slasher flick. As it was, I still liked it, but it would have been a lot better without the human villain...the danger posed by the mission itself should have been enough suspense on its own. Great post!

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:04:57 -0800

Man, I could just worship that thing...

By: salishsea

salishsea — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:07:26 -0800

Thanks for that dseaton... And yes the comments get very strange as you go down, but one shines brightly: "Susan, I appreciate your enthusiasm for science, but in reality these are the gifts that H has bestowed on us all. H really makes the ultimate sacrifice in this case, and He is a by-product." In the context of "His great works", "He" made me chuckle.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:31:04 -0800

You're going to need a bigger Big Picture.

By: ersatz

ersatz — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:50:49 -0800

The 5th picture is so Russian avant-garde.

By: Minus215Cee

Minus215Cee — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:35:44 -0800

Fantastic photos! Thank you for the lovely post.

By: robotot

robotot — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:33:44 -0800

Awesome, but how come there's no photos of the sun at night?

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:25:03 -0800

My mother always told me not to look directly at the sun. But now that I've just looked at it, the sun doesn't seem so bad.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 01:08:32 -0800

Enceladus up close

By: TedW

TedW — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:17:49 -0800

My mother always told me not to look directly at the sun. But momma, that's where the fun is...