Solar Tsunami

Watch this and other space videos at SpaceRip.com Excerpt from “Attack of the Sun.” The SOHO spacecraft has recorded the effect of all this rising energy. Its ultraviolet sensors show a wavy pattern of gas on the sun’s surface, along with the super-hot halo of gas called the corona. The white regions are places where the rising gas suddenly escapes. Immense loops of ionized gas, ten times the diameter of Earth, rise and fall back. These solar prominences are hot, about 60000 degrees Celsius. But there are times when the release of energy on the solar surface gets bottled up, by magnetic fields generated by the sun’s spinning turbulent core. Using data from the sun’s exterior, scientists have modeled these fields as they erupt all around the sun’s surface, twisting and looping. Heat rising toward the surface follows these magnetic field lines, which can also stifle the rising columns, forming relatively cool patches. That’s where sunspots form. Four centuries ago, Galileo Galilei was the first to argue that these blotches were actually on the Sun’s surface, though he suspected they were clouds. Their nature remained unclear until 1908, when the astronomer George Ellery Hale demonstrated the link between sunspots and intense magnetic fields. Over the years, scientists have drawn their strange shapes in an effort to understand them. What they didn’t see, until recently, was the heat and pressure building around them. Using data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory …