Thursday, November 30, 2017

Rare Encircling Filament - UNIVERSE


We came across an oddity this week that our spacecraft has rarely observed before: a dark filament encircling an active region (Oct. 29-31, 2017). Solar filaments are clouds of charged particles that float above the sun, tethered to it by magnetic forces.

They are usually elongated and uneven strands. Only a handful of times before have we seen one shaped like a circle. (The black area to the left of the brighter active region is a coronal hole, a magnetically open region of the sun).


Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA.
https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/potw/item/854

No comments:

Post a Comment