NASA just sent me this beautiful video of the sun. “There’s no science behind it,” says Scott Wiessinger, Helio and Astrophysics Video Producer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “but it’s very pretty.” You got it, Scott. It’s also very trippy.
This video takes SDO images and applies additional processing to enhance the structures visible. While there is no scientific value to this processing, it does result in a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun. The original frames are in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet. This wavelength shows plasma in the solar atmosphere, called the corona, that is around 600,000 Kelvin. The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in “active regions” where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light as sunspots. The events in this video represent 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011.
[NASA]