Watch what a year in the life of the sun looks like in six minutes
Giant plasma loops and shifting sun spots are all seen in this time lapse video from NASA.
Take a close look at the sun. It’s a tremendously hot, golden brown rotating orb spewing out plasma as its magnetic fields shift and merge. That’s the view that NASA has recorded over a year and time-lapsed it to a six-minute long video. The giant star’s activity was captured in extreme ultraviolet wavelength not visible to the human eye by the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite.
The sun is our closest source of heat and energy but we still have much to understand about its surface, corona and atmosphere. Scientists are now focussing on the Sun’s magnetic field, which is responsible for big swirling plasma loops that reach from the star’s interior all the way to its atmosphere. These plasma loops and coronal mass ejections often disrupt satellites, imperil astronauts and cause electrical blackouts on earth.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite that has been monitoring the sun since 2010 is giving scientists a better handle on how and why the Sun’s magnetic fields change to help predict how it will affect future space weather. Scientists are trying to answer questions like why the sun is so hot at 600,000 Kelvin to how a sun spot cycle evolves and plays out. NASA is also watching our closest star to understand others in the galaxy.
This video is a depiction of the sun between January 1, 2015 and January 28, 2016, with each frame of the video representing a two hours of observational time. The satellite took a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths, which helps to keep an eye on the various processes simmering on the plasma body.