Sunday, November 23, 2014
Sunday Science Blog
"Published on Nov 7, 2014 The surface of the sun from October 14th to 30th, 2014, showing sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles (22 years).
During this time sunspot AR 2191 produced six X-class and four M-class solar flares. The animation shows the sun in the ultraviolet 304 ångström wavelength, and plays at a rate of 52.5 minutes per second.
It is composed of more than 17,000 images, 72 GB of data produced by the solar dynamics observatory (http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/) + (http://www.helioviewer.org/).
This animation has be rendered in 4K, and resized to the Youtube maximum resolution of 3840×2160. The animation has been rotated 180 degrees so that south is "up". The audio is the 'heartbeat' of the sun, processed from SOHO HMI data by Alexander G. Kosovichev.
Image data courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams."Image processing and animation by James Tyrwhitt-Drake." --YouTube
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11 comments:
When one remembers that the diameter of the Sun is more than a hundred times that of the Earth, the scale of the flares and other phenomena we're seeing here is staggering.
What would the great pioneers like Eratosthenes and Galileo have thought, if they knew what we can actually see and watch today.
It is an awesome (and that word is used in the correct sense here -- causing feelings of fear and wonder) thing to behold. Those flares we see in the video could consume the Earth. And it is wondrous that we Earthlings can witness the Sun's fearsome beauty.
Yes it is truly awesome.
One day our sun will be a black hole.
Makes me wonder how many beginning and endings there have been. Not that it's important.
BTW, have you seen Interstellar yet?
I'm no scientist, but obviously sun spots are just a conspiracy between elitist college professors and the government as a means to steal more of our tax money. The video was probably made by Pixar.
"BTW, have you seen Interstellar yet?"
No, but it is on my list to see, as well as the Stephen Hawking film, and coming in December, "Unbroken."
Actually our sun is not large enough to become a black hole. It will be a white dwarf instead.
A red giant first, then a white dwarf?
The Helium Flash
The beginning of the end for a red giant the mass of our Sun occurs very suddenly. As the helium "ashes" continue to pile up at its center, a higher fraction of them turn electron-degenerate. It is an odd paradox: even as the outer layers of a red giant star are expanding into a huge but tenuous cloud, its inner core is contracting down to form a buried white dwarf. The temperature and pressure in the Sun's core will soar to 10 times their current values. And roughly 1.2 billion years after it leaves the main sequence, at the height of its glory as a red giant, the center of the helium core of the Sun will become sufficiently massive, dense, and hot that something amazing will happen: within a matter of minutes, it will ignite and burn.
When the temperature in the core reaches about 100 million degrees, the helium will begin to fuse into carbon by a reaction known as the triple-alpha process, because it converts three helium nuclei into one carbon atom. This generates a great deal of heat. However, unlike when the Sun was young and its core contained normal matter, adding more heat to the electron-degenerate helium does not cause it to expand and cool. As I noted when I was discussing quantum mechanics, electron-degenerate matter behaves more like a liquid than a gas when you heat it: its temperature swiftly rises, but it doesn't expand. In other words, the self-regulating mechanism that keeps main-sequence stars so stable (hydrostatic equilibrium) is turned off in electron-degenerate matter. If you add heat to a white dwarf, it just gets hotter.
The rest is HERE.
Jerry: I'm no scientist, but obviously sun spots are just a conspiracy between elitist college professors and the government as a means to steal more of our tax money. The video was probably made by Pixar.
Joke that may be, but there is a guy on YouTube who claims that the Moon doesn't really exist and is just a projected image of some kind. I watched a couple of his videos and couldn't make out what he thinks it's projected on, or where the projector is, but he's quite serious. I'm sure if we looked we could find some crank out there who thinks the Sun isn't real as well.
This video is awesome. Wow. It strangely ties in with my insatiable midlife craze for all things sciency :)
Recently got Bill Nye to autograph his new book too !
Hey Teeluck! Great to see you here!
"The great thing about science is that it's true, whether you believe it or not."--Neil deGrasse Tyson
"The claim that global warming is caused by man-made emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science."
--- Jim Inhofe (T - Dense)
“We’re finding out the world is staying the same or actually cooling.”
--- Louie Gohmert (T - Stupefied)
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Unfortunately, Shaw, these are the guys running the show, st least for now.
Science and clear thinking to a Teabag is like garlic to a vampire.
I wonder if they step back and let the grandeur of the natural world move them. I imagine they just see it as something to exploit for profit.
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