Science Art: Thanksgiving Day sunspots (SOHO EIT 171 Latest Image: 2020/11/26 13:00), by NASA & ESA

29 November 2020 grant Featured, Science Art 0

Scientific Illustration of solar storms, or sunspots, from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
Scientific Illustration of solar storms, or sunspots, from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory

Scientific Illustration of solar storms, or sunspots, from the Solar and Heliospheric ObservatoryClick to embiggen

This is what our Sun looked like on Thanksgiving Day. There are sunspots across the lower right of the image, visible here as what sunspots actually are – very large magnetic storms, like plasma cyclones.

The picture is from the SOHO gallery of the latest images of the Sun, which has all kinds of different ways of looking at that big, bright, orange ball. This particular image is from the EIT, or “Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Telescope,” which can isolate different wavelengths of UV light to see what temperature the material is we’re looking at:

In the images taken at 304 Angstrom the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 degrees Kelvin. In those taken at 171 Angstrom, at 1 million degrees. 195 Angstrom images correspond to about 1.5 million Kelvin, 284 Angstrom to 2 million degrees. The hotter the temperature, the higher you look in the solar atmosphere.

This photo is from EIT 171, so it’s the 171 Angstrom wavelength, so the sunspots are deeper toward the core of the sun.

I found the image thanks to a related image tweeted by ESA.