A July 2012 CME from SDO

  • Released Thursday, January 31, 2013
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On July 18, 2012, a fairly small explosion of light burst off the lower right limb of the sun. Such flares often come with an associated eruption of solar material, known as a coronal mass ejection or CME — but this one did not. Something interesting did happen, however. Magnetic field lines in this area of the sun's atmosphere, the corona, began to twist and kink, generating the hottest solar material — a charged gas called plasma — to trace out the newly-formed slinky shape. The plasma glowed brightly in extreme ultraviolet images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and scientists were able to watch for the first time the very formation of something they had long theorized was at the heart of many eruptive events on the sun: a flux rope.

Eight hours later, on July 19, the same region flared again. This time the flux rope's connection to the sun was severed, and the magnetic fields escaped into space, dragging billions of tons of solar material along for the ride — a classic CME.

1080 HD movie of the CME launch in the 171angstrom AIA filter.

4Kx4K frames with time tags and frame numbers in the 171angstrom AIA filter.

1080 HD movie of the CME launch. This movie has a slightly modified color table to bring out details of the flux rope on the right limb of the Sun in the 131angstrom AIA filter.

4Kx4K frames with time tags and frame numbers in the 131angstrom AIA filter.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, the SDO Science Team, and the Virtual Solar Observatory.

This page was originally published on Thursday, January 31, 2013.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:03 AM EST.

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