Filament Archives - The Sun Today with Dr. C. Alex Young

August 4, 2014

Categories

Solar Observations

Giant Filament Staring at Earth

High above the solar surface in the hot million+ C solar corona sits a giant filament of cooler (~50,000 C), denser material, both supported and restrained by solar magnetic fields. If this filament should become unstable as they sometimes do […]

June 17, 2014

Categories

Solar Observations

The Sun is really, really big!

A giant filament on the eastern edge of the sun really puts the size of our star, Earth and the planets into perspective. This structure of solar plasma, a billion plus tons of 80,000 degree Fahrenheit material, sits high above […]

June 5, 2014

Categories

Solar Observations

Giant Filament Erupting into Space

A huge filament on the southeast of the sun erupted towards the end of June 4. The filament was somewhere between a whopping 500,000 – 1 million km in length. This eruption produced a fairly slow coronal mass ejection that […]

April 22, 2012

Categories

Solar Observations

A Prominence Eruption Sends a CME to Mercury

On April 22, 2012, filament material uncurled as an erupting prominence around sunspot group AR11463. There was a C1.8 solar flare and the resulting eruption produced a SCORE-C CME detected by SOHO/LASCO C2 at 15:30 UT.

April 17, 2012

April162012-M1.7andEruption-nocaptions.001

Categories

Solar Observations

Beautiful Eruptions from the East Limb of the Sun

An eruption of plasma from just behind the solar limb observed by SDO with the 304 Angstrom camera.This shows material at temperatures around 60,000-80,000 Kelvin. This produced a CME that went out the left side (East) of the Sun starting around 2 UT. At ~1000 km/s the CME has a SCORE O (for ordinary). NASA produced a computer model predicting the CME will impact STEREO Behind on 4/17 at 7:40 UT (but not Earth).

March 14, 2012

Categories

Solar Observations

Unidentified Sun Object is Identified! A Little Black Spot on The Sun Today

On March 12, 2012, Sunsflare posted a video asking if anyone could identify a circular object seen in SDO coronal images. The video was also posted on Facebook with the same question posed. I answered the question on Facebook but […]