Sun ID: 4027

A July 2012 CME from SDO

Visualizations by Tom Bridgman Released on January 31, 2013

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.

Visualization Credits

Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Lead Animator
Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Producer
Angelos Vourlidas (NRL): Scientist
Karen Fox (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Writer

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.

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4027

Mission:
SDO

Data Used: