Solar Probe Films Plasma Loops, Sunspots in Action

brian0918 writes "NewScientist reports that Japan's Hinode (Solar-B) spacecraft has captured videos of surface details of the Sun, including the development of loops of hot plasma above the surface, and activity around sunspots. From the article: 'It is hoped that its observations will shed light on what triggers solar eruptions — called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These ejections spew out radiation that poses a health risk for astronauts, and they can also knock out satellites. The mission team is still testing out the spacecraft's instruments, but full scientific observations will probably be underway by January 2007.' More videos can be viewed at NASA's site."

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

This is insanely cool stuff. As neat looking as any idea of the Sun's up close appearance that Hollywood might conjure up.

We've had solar probes filming this for years!

[plasmacutter]

Now this is a slow news day..
I remember watching documentaries including high resolution footage conforming fully to this description from solar probes a full 9 (NINE) years ago.

this is verrry late to be reporting on footage from solar probes.

Re:We've had solar probes filming this for years!

[Anonymous Coward]

At this spatial resolution? Tell me which, please....

It has to be asked...

[cbhacking]

We already know about the malicious spirits in the sun that shoot balls of plasma at us. The question is, what keeps them from knocking out this spy with a well-aimed CME?*

*The second question is at least half-serious.

Re:It has to be asked...

[A beautiful mind]

We already know about the malicious spirits in the sun that shoot balls of plasma at us.

Hey, you! Be careful or the scientologists will sue /. again!

Re:It has to be asked...

[W2IRT]

We already know about the malicious spirits in the sun that shoot balls of plasma at us
Malicious spirits you say? Or perhaps Malicious sprites? I'll have to run this one by Sunspot Louie and The Old Timer.

Everybody, even the QRPers down the hill, knows that Sunspots are whipped up by the Palos Verdes Sundancers every 11 years http://www.geocities.com/k2cddx/sundancers.html. At the bottom of the cycle their leader, Solar Max hauls out the Big Bass Bongo, BIG DX, and so begins the whirling machinations that bring about the arrival of the next sunspot peak, which, as you know, charges the ionosphere sufficiently to allow HF radio signals to be refracted back to earth thousands of miles from their source. CMEs, however, are the flies in that ointment.

We never did consider the source of the CMEs, Type II sweeps, X-10 class flares with all the trimmings, etc. they were just part of the Eternal Enigmas and the Mysteries of the Ages. Malicious sprites indeed. We will have to give this some more thought!

Be a believer! The Golden Days of DXing are at hand; the signs are everywhere. Soon there will be DX for all, although more for some than others. DX IS!


(no, I'm not off my nut. This post is an homage to the late Hugh Cassidy, WA6AUD, and his wonderful DX Stories in the West Coast DX bulletin (and later by Paul Dunphy, VE1DX). If you're into some fun ham radio lore, check 'em out at http://www.geocities.com/k2cddx/dxstories.html. Thanks, Cass!)

What, EXACTLY, makes it different?

[cbhacking]

We've had satellites designed to study the sun for decades now. We have magnetograms, cameras operating all the way up into the Gamma frequencies, spectrographs of about 14 different varieties, and good old-fashioned eyeballs (heavily filtered if directly observing the surface). This is revolutionary because...?

That said, it's certianly good to learn more about the most vital, influential, and dangerous object in the solar system.

Re:What, EXACTLY, makes it different?

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, it's certianly good to learn more about the most vital, influential, and dangerous object in the solar system.

Paris Hilton?

Re:What, EXACTLY, makes it different?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is revolutionary because...?

Because the processes responsible for many of those phenomena happen on spatial scales of around 100km, whereas so far existing space facilities where limited to a resolution of ~700km or (way) worse.

Furthermore, long time sequences at this resolution are needed to understand what's going on, and this is (sort of) a problem for ground-based observatories due to the degrading influence of the earth's atmosphere.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

shed light

[Swimport]

Why would you want to shed light on the sun?

Re:shed light

[A beautiful mind]

To be able to see the sunspots, silly.

Re:shed light

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually sunspots aren't dark. They are only darker than other parts of the sun.

oddly beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

oddly beautiful .mpg of plasma arcing...

Re:oddly beautiful

[ari wins]

OMG, I've seen that in anime before. That means...they must KNOW THE FUTURE!! The world will soon end in a craze of technoviolence and mutant tentacles! Repent! Repent! Or was that the one that ended with bunny-girl necking with the twin psychic sisters. I don't quite remember..

hmmm

[inferis]

Well, this is some hot action!

Because it's cool.

[Kadin2048]

This is revolutionary because...?

Because I still had a spot on my wall that was lacking an awesome solar-flare poster, duh.

Wait...you mean, they put those telescopes and stuff up there for some purpose other than making really neat posters and desktop patterns? Bonus.

"solar" probe?

[macadamia_harold]

It is hoped that [the probe's] observations will shed light on what triggers eruptions -- called coronal mass ejections (CMEs)

Are you sure this isn't a probe that they sent to Uranus?

Plasma Loops.....

[Temujin_12]

....I think I just had a great idea for a new cereal brand. Sorry, I'm hungry.

Mirror

[Ankur Dave]

Mirror of that

Sun Ring To Rule Them All

[donwhompo]

I always had a bad feeling about that sunspot, but I never suspected it was the Eye of Sauron.

very OT, but

[rucs_hack]

can someone please tell me how this tagging thing works? I can't seem to work out how to do that..

Re:very OT, but

[rucs_hack]

yes, I know its offtopic, I said so, but still, an answer?

Re:very OT, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how tagging works. But you should consider posting as Anonymous Coward to avoid being modded down. Especially today - seems some juvenile God-Modder has points.

Go ahead - mod me down.

Re:very OT, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Click on the "tagging beta" link under the summary for an explanation.

Re:very OT, but

[nowhere.elysium]

Click on the link that says 'tagging beta', and it'll lead you to a page with the information on it.

Re:very OT, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how tagging works. But you should consider posting as Anonymous Coward to avoid being modded down. Especially today - seems some juvenile God-Modder has points.

Have you meta-moderated lately?

Re:very OT, but

[Anonymous Coward]

>Have you meta-moderated lately?

Most days, lately. It just seems a waste of mod points to mod something like that down. Mod good stuff *up* and it'll float to the surface. I noticed several moderators wasting their 5 mod points modding things *down*. And I am the original A/C in the grandparent.

16 MB video

[Anonymous Coward]

Who linked a 16 MB video from Slashdot's front page?
Hope this poor guy has a hosting like NASA... oh, wait...

Scale?

[nacturation]

Anyone know what scale that video is at? In other words, what's the real-world distance from the left edge to the right edge?

Re:Scale?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Anyone know what scale that video is at? In other words, what's the real-world distance
> from the left edge to the right edge?

It's the same width as your monitor.

Re:Scale?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article doesn't say. OTOH, the image seems to have some curvature. Let's say it's 1 degree of curvature (looks like more). That would mean, with a sun diameter of 870k miles:
        (870 000 miles * pi) / 360 = 12 218.4329 kilometers
Or about one real-world earth wide.
HTH.

higher res, different wavelengths

[oneiros27]

Hinode (SOLAR-B) is in may ways an upgrade to the previous Yohkoh (SOLAR-A) mission.

The main difference is that Hinode uses 4 megapixel cameras over the 1 megapixel cameras flown in other space-based solar observatories. (note -- ground based solar observatories have higher resolutiion cameras, but they can't observe these frequencies as x-rays can't make it past the atmosphere. (RHESSI observes in hard x-ray, but it's not a full-disk imager. SXI on GOES is full disk, but it's on soft x-ray)

Now, a couple of weeks after Hinode launched, STEREO also launched -- which is not only 4 megapixel cameras, but two observatories, and besides Ulysses, the first (two) solar observatories not in the sun-earth line. (I'm not a solar physicist, so I don't know what sort of instrumentation package Ulysses carried. Due to the flight path not staying a constant distance from the sun, and because our group doesn't track it*, I can only assume it's insitu and not remote sensing). The more impressive solar observatory will be the Solar Dynamics Observatory, aka SDO.

The reason that SDO is impressive, even though it's in the sun-earth line and isn't as useful as STEREO for solar weather, is that it will be flying 16 megapixel cameras. Because it will be in an inclined geosyncronous orbit, it will have its own ground station for constant data transfer at a full data rate without making use of the Deep Space Network. This allows it to not only send larger pictures, but more of them -- AIA will be taking images every 10 seconds. No space based solar observatory even comes close to that sort of a data rate. (STEREO is estimated at 1.5GB/day, while SDO will be 1TB/day)

* By 'our group', I'm referring to the Virtual Solar Observatory, for which I'm a programmer.
** Please be aware that these are the things that I hear in passing while doing my job. Although I think I'm right on all of this, it wouldn't hurt to get a second source that actually is a solar physicist and deals with the instruments directly.

Re:higher res, different wavelengths

[Korin43]

Why 4 megapixel? I was under the impression that 6 megapixel cameras were on the market..

Re:higher res, different wavelengths

[cbhacking]

STEREO launched some time ago (they are two of the many satellites which I mentioned we already had up) when 4MP was pretty good. Remember that space hardware needs to be hardened against radiation; it tends to lag slightly behind the cutting edge of consumer electronics. However, they make up for it in quality; I'm sure those 4MP cameras (probably even the old 1MP cameras) took images of comparable of superior power to my one-year-old 5MP camera.

So, having said all that... the new observatory uses 16 megapixel cameras. Those, too, are not cutting edge - DSLRs have had 30+ for a while now I think, certainly they had 20+ last year - but they are probably the highest-resolution cameras looking at the sun by a significant factor (say, 4x).

old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be a slow /. news day. That story is a week old. Its even been on the local news here.

Films?! How'd they get the film back?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing it's much more likely some type of digital imaging was used. I don't think anyone has used film in satellites and space probes for many years.

garbelled mplayer output...

[Thaidog]

Well half of them are really amazing... the other half I could not see. Anybody else getting garbelled mplayer output?

I saw

[Anonymous Coward]

this TWO DAYS AGO on CCTV9.

hah :~ :~ :~D

surface structure of Sol

[gobbo]

Hey astronomer nerds: does anyone have further updates on the theory that the Sun has a ferrite/calcium solid surface that lights up the neon plasma layer with electric arcs? Will Hinode help with clearing this up? Heven't heard much on this interesting interpretation recently.

Re:surface structure of Sol

[pln2bz]

This may be what you're looking for. Click on the "Iron Sun Debate" links on this page ...

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/00subjectx.htm#S olar

But be careful talking about electric arcing in the Sun around these parts. You might start a ruckus!

I suspect that there are few observations at this point in time that will dramatically alter the debate about the Sun. The problem is not really a function of observations. The problem has more to do with the stuff happening on the other end of the telescopes.

It's the large size of mirror that matters

[helioquake]

No no, the major achievement of Hinode isn't the size of the detector.

It's the large size of the telescopic mirror used for this mission. It's extremely hard to build a solar telescope with a large mirror (50cm for SOT? I forgot) because a large mirror would increase heat intake from the Sun into the optic system. Unless one finds a way to release its heat intake from the satellite, it keeps heating up. And that's really not good thing for the satellite and instruments on board. The trick is to release most of unnecessary heat by guiding some excess light (esp in IR) out of the optical path and Hinode has successfully managed to achieve it.

Solaris

[GWBasic]

Is anyone reminded of the descriptions of the arcing loops in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris?