A sunspot about the size of Jupiter is currently rotating across the face of the Sun. It is the largest active region seen since the last solar cycle and has the potential to produce a lot of powerful solar flares. The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory has some impressive shots of the flares produced so far.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Largest Solar Active Region Seen Since 1990
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 17 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday October 27 2014, @09:54AM
A sunspot about the size of Jupiter is currently rotating across the face of the Sun.
It's the Sun that's rotating. Aren't the sunspots just translating? (they do move relative to the surface of the Sun, I believe)
The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory has some impressive shots of the flares produced so far.
Does anyone know what that massive dark scar across the upper half of the Sun is?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Monday October 27 2014, @10:16AM
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Monday October 27 2014, @12:31PM
So, not a crack in the space/time continuum then.?
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Monday October 27 2014, @01:31PM
You don't know how relieved I was ... I mean that thing must be some 800000 km (=a chain of 62 Earths) long.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hubie on Monday October 27 2014, @12:29PM
The base of the sunspots are tied to the surface of the Sun. It is a little bit of semantics because the Sun doesn't rotate in a simple fashion anyway, and you need to define what you're calling the surface, but the sunspots rotate with the Sun because they come from the solar magnetic field. However, because it is a ball of plasma, it exhibits differential rotation where the regions near its equator rotate at different rates than that towards the polar regions. Also, regions under the surface rotate differently as well. All this differential rotation twists and ties the magnetic field lines into knots which result in flares, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), etc. When the material bursts out of the Sun, it travels out radially dragging magnetic field lines with it and you end up with a spiral-looking magnetic field pattern (as viewed looking down from one of the Sun's poles) often likened to the water coming out of a rotating lawn sprinkler (named Parker Spirals [nasa.gov] after Eugene Parker). When you throw in the solar rotation, the tilt of the rotation, and the magnetic field reversals, you get a neat looking picture of the heliospheric current sheet [stanford.edu].
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday October 27 2014, @04:13PM
The HTML source just conains placeholders like this:
<p>[image-95]</p>
Since when did the IMG tag become a deprecated way of including images into a webpage?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday October 27 2014, @05:53PM
Which of the URLs do you discuss?
(Score: 3) by maxwell demon on Monday October 27 2014, @10:07AM
All I get on that page is some text and "Loading ..."
I guess if I were to enable JavaScript, I'd see the images. But a page that requires me to enable JavaScript just to see a few images is broken.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @10:30AM
Maybe someone who has more patience than I do (and who isn't afraid of Google) can point out some especially nice selections.
http://www.google.com/search?q=sunspot+2192&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:w [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by hubie on Monday October 27 2014, @03:14PM
This [universetoday.com] looks like a pretty nice page.
I forgot to mention in the article summary that I read on one of the SDO blog posts (and on the page I just linked) that apparently the sunspot is large enough that you can see it without a telescope. I don't have an appropriate filter to try it out, but you should easily be able to see it with a pinhole camera.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 27 2014, @08:37PM
Thank you for that link. A nice page, indeed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday October 27 2014, @05:49PM
Define broken.
At least one of the pages (second link) uses JS to show multiple images in the same space by clicking the arrows.
Very few other ways to do that with a single hit to the web server. The others seem to use it for menus mostly.
Killing JS was your choice, you should have used a plugin blocker that had a quick on/off switch.
My friend uses only Lynx, and nobody in his office pays attention to his whining either.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday October 27 2014, @05:55PM
So when can we expect these sun flares? or where to read about their prognosis?
(Score: 2) by hubie on Monday October 27 2014, @09:04PM
The flares can erupt at any time and there is no way to tell when or how powerful it will be. When the flares erupt, they emit lots of energetic particles into space. If we are lucky, we don't get hit by them because it can damage spacecraft and cause problems with the ionosphere. There are a number of spacecraft and ground-based telescopes that monitor the Sun, so we get warning when a powerful flare goes off, so we at least have some advanced warning that something might be coming.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Monday October 27 2014, @06:07PM
The other day I was projecting the sun an a piece of paper with a hand held magnifying glass just to observe the eclipse. That Monster was not in sight at that time, but there were a lot of other spots.
As a kid, maybe 4th or 5th grade, my dad built me this wooden contraption that held a magnifying glass in front of a standard smallish tablet (the paper kind) behind a round cutout, and it adjusted for angle, and focusing, etc. Held at the right distance, (way closer than ant-burning distance) you'd get a perfect image of the sun on the sheet.
Every fair day for a summer, I would trot that thing out on the lawn, at noon(ish) and faithfully mark all the sunspots on a new leaf of the tablet, date it. It was my first "science" project, and it produced the coolest flip book [wikipedia.org] of sunspots marching across the sun. Even sandlot baseball games got interrupted for 15 minutes at noon. (Yeah, I was THAT kid).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @07:31PM
that's pretty cool, man.
so, will winter come early or late this year? what will my future wife be like? tell me, Kid Seer! tell me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @07:14AM
is the sky falling?