STORMS FROM THE SUN
Hi! My name is Mark and I'm going to tell you about what I spend most of my time doing...looking at storms from the Sun!
Total solar eclipses let us see the Sun's atmosphere, called the corona, which is normally hidden from our view. However, they only happen about once a year and then they only last for a few minutes. That doesn't give us much time to study the corona!
To be able to see the corona more often we use a special type of telescope called a coronagraph with a disc that blocks out the Sun just like the moon does during an eclipse. One of these telescopes, LASCO , is in space on the SOHO satellite and now we can see eclipses all day, every day!
By watching the corona from space we found that huge explosions often come from the Sun (at least one every few days).
Image courtesy of the LASCO/SOHO consortium. SOHO is a mission of international cooperation between of ESA and NASA.
This picture was taken by the LASCO telescope on SOHO.
The white circle in the middle shows where the Sun is. It is hidden
behind the black circle.
Click on the link to see a movie of
the Sun's atmosphere in action!
The explosion you see in the movie is no ordinary explosion. It is called a coronal mass ejection ( CME for short) and it blows millions of tonnes of gas from the Sun's atmosphere out into space at very high speeds.
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CMEs were first seen in the 1970s when coronagraphs were carried into space by the OSO-7 satellite and by the space station Skylab. |
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A large CME is made up of almost 10 thousand million tonnes of gas and moves at speeds up to a million miles an hour!
Over 600 times faster!
We don't see them because, although they contain huge amounts of matter, the light from them is very faint and is always swamped by the light from the Sun's disk.
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