SOHO Produces Images of Sunspot Interiors

Judebert writes: "The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO, the one that looks at the Sun) has used a Doppler-like device to look underneath the surface of a sunspot. It turns out to be much shallower than expected, but the data does help explain why sunspots last so much longer than theory dictates. NASA's story is more informative, but the pictures and movies at Stanford are spectacular. I've got a new background!"

Pimpin' science sitez like nobodyz bizness....

SOHO's main page [nasa.gov] is a blast in general, pardon the pun. The up-to-date images of the Sun just look cool, and it has a pretty comprehensive set of links to information about that big thermonuclear furnace about 93 million miles thataway *points at big glowing thing in sky*.

It's also rather good for reminding oneself that there are things far greater than ourselves, and our own self-made problems and petty arguments. Insert quote from Babylon 5: "And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder" here.

The sights, the smells...

and Oh Yes, the sounds:

BelowSunspot_rendering.mp3 (3 Meg) [stanford.edu]

Ever wanted to know what a sunspot sounds like? Now's your chance! Just don't trade it on MusicCity, or Hilary'll get ya!

"Shallower," indeed.....

This sort of makes you realize just how relative measurements really are....and how really small humans and our problems are on a cosmic scale.... Kind of dangerous, actually....'anyone remember the nefarious device from _The_Resteraunt_at_the_End_of_the_Universe_, the "Total reality perspective vortex", or whatever it was called? Excuse me whilst I quietly go insane from the scale of things.....

Even more important in the future...

From the site:

"Why do we care? Understanding sunspots is essential for understanding the 11-year solar cycle, solar flare explosions, and huge coronal mass ejections that affect life and society on Earth."

Solar flares can screw up satellites and such, but as people begin to move into space more(missions to mars in the next 50 years, moon in possibly less, aren't beyond the realm of consideration anymore) this will become even more important. Getting caught by a flare without any of the protection Earth's magentosphere offers is a quick way to get fried. Any interplanet ship would obviously have to have some kind of shielding(probably between water/fuel tanks), but being able to more accurately understand and predict flares, especially for cheaper/shorter moon trips, will be vital.

APOD

Hmmm, just finished checking APOD.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Load /. and this is the latest "news" go figure.

Check out a real astronomy site if you want real, consistent astronomy.

Acne?

Sol is a relatively young sun, no? Could it be that our sun is merely experiencing acne?

MSNBC Coverage

MSNBC also has a story with more pictures as well as a video right over here. [msnbc.com] A pretty well written article (If not as in-dept as the stanford one) and the video interview is pretty interesting.

A picture is worth...

93,000,000 words.

Sigh, now if I just had a real printer. Some of this stuff is definitely frame-worthy.

The Puppeteer needn't have worried

In Ringworld Engineers, when Louis Wu describes the Hindmost's fate aboard the unstable structure as the chance to "Study sunspots from underneath," the Puppeteer, instead of rolling up into a ball, could simply have replied "We already have that technology; your people invented it years ago." Of course that was hardly the point, as the Hindmost, Wu, Chmee, and all the Ringworld population appear to be doomed when it would crash into its sun. But it brings up the question: there any science fiction written during the sixties and seventies that hasn't been outdated or at least modified in some way by the constant march of science reality?

--Jim

Fractals?

Is it just me or did the sunspot in the animations from the stanford page look like a mandlebrot set?

Wait a second...

"the data does help explain why sunspots last so much longer than theory dictates."

You mean the universe doesn't always work the way us little humans think it should?

Field or Flow - which comes first?

"We discovered that the outflowing material was just a surface feature," said Zhao. "If you can look a bit deeper, you find material rushing inward, like a planet-sized whirlpool or hurricane. This inflow pulls the magnetic fields together."

The cool thing for me (and I confess upfront that I don't remember much about plasma flow in stellar atmospheres) is the question of which comes first now - the magnetic field disturbance or the plasma flow.

I know that a hot ionized plasma will freeze the magnetic field lines to the plasma - and that as the plasma moves it will drag the field with it.

So what's happening here? Is the magnetic field causing the whirlpool ala the Babcock model - or is there some sort of convention flow pulling the magnetic field along with it?

Anyone more current than I know?

Holy Schnikies!

Anyone else read this and think, man my small office/home office is *CRAP* compared to some guy who's producing sunspot images!

Maybe it's just me, and I have SOHO inferiority complex.

Big Deal

I figure most any SOHO [soho.org] could make these up with nothing more than Photoshop and a couple of hours.

Suntimes I wonder...

This is a pretty week display of our tax dollars at work. Staring at the sun.

Pictures...

For that matter, it was also covered on APOD [nasa.gov] today. :)