This video was named an “editors’ pick” by The Atlantic and titled “The ‘Heartbeat’ of the Sun.” It’s a time-lapse view of two weeks of solar activity and includes audio of the sun itself. The second video is the view cropped to Sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles. Note the sunspot alone is 14 times wider than Earth.
This is our sun. Observe, and contemplate your insignificance …
Notes from YouTube:
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.
Wow PT, that’s just amazing. I’m surprised we didn’t have lots of negative affects from this. Or did I just miss the news?
I had to look it up. But no damage. From space.com:
“What’s really curious about it [the large sunspot] is that it’s produced so many flares of pretty good size, but little or no coronal mass ejections,” Young said. “It’s not that it’s never happened before, but it tends to be the case that when you have a big flare, you generally get a big CME.”
Earth-directed CMEs are responsible for geomagnetic storms that can harm satellites in orbit or even knock out power grids on the planet. A CME produced by a sunspot larger than AR 2192 knocked out the power in Quebec, Canada, in 1989, Young said.
Very odd…
Yep, but I’m not complaining.
Oh, I do SO hear that! 😉
koolest!
Nature is awesome, that’s for sure.
Surly it must be the hand of All Mighty God that holds it all together!
Personally I credit gravity.
I’m with you on that PT 😛
I actually find this quite frightening,I know it’s beem doing this for hundreds and thousands of millions of years but I was watching this waiting for it to go BOOM, I was almost terrified 😮
You stated that in this south was up, just like I think the earth is, the way I see it the northern hemisphere is at the bottom and Australia and the southern hemisphere are on top. It’s true that Australia is slipping towards the equator and will in time bump into big heaps of Asian countries, so therefore if we are sliding we must be sliding down, you can’t slide up. So you Yankees are downunder not us. The mind boggles 😀
O_o o_O 😈
The Indian sub continent slid own bumped into Asia and squashed the land and pushed up big mountains that we call the Himalayas, .
Have a good weekend 😛
I don’t think we or anyone we know needs to worry about continental drift. And as long as “down” is under my feet, I’m happy.