SDO Observes Fast-Growing Sunspot
- Visualizations by:
- Scott Wiessinger
- View full credits
The spot quickly evolved into what's called a delta region, in which the lighter areas around the sunspot, the penumbra, exhibit magnetic fields that point in the opposite direction of those fields in the center, dark area. This is a fairly unstable configuration that scientists know can lead to eruptions of radiation on the sun called solar flares.

The bottom two black spots on the sun, known as sunspots, appeared quickly over the course of Feb. 19-20, 2013. These two sunspots are part of the same system and are over six Earths across. This image combines images from two instruments on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO): the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), which takes pictures in visible light that show sunspots and the Advanced Imaging Assembly (AIA), which took an image in the 304 angstrom wavelength showing the lower atmosphere of the sun, which is colorized in red.
Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/HMI/Goddard Space Flight Center

Wider version of image. The bottom two black spots on the sun, known as sunspots, appeared quickly over the course of Feb. 19-20, 2013. These two sunspots are part of the same system and are over six Earths across. This image combines images from two instruments on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO): the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), which takes pictures in visible light that show sunspots and the Advanced Imaging Assembly (AIA), which took an image in the 304 angstrom wavelength showing the lower atmosphere of the sun, which is colorized in red.
Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/HMI/Goddard Space Flight Center

Full Disk image at full SDO resolution. This image combines images from two instruments on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO): the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), which takes pictures in visible light that show sunspots and the Advanced Imaging Assembly (AIA), which took an image in the 304 angstrom wavelength showing the lower atmosphere of the sun, which is colorized in red.
Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/HMI/Goddard Space Flight Center
For More Information
See http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/fastgrowing-sunspot.html
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO
Animator
- Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle) [Lead]
Writer
- Karen Fox (ADNET)
Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Tapes
This visualization originally appeared on the following tapes:- None
Datasets used in this visualization
SDO
Dataset can be found at: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/
See more visualizations using this data setSDO AIA 171 (A.K.A. 171 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setSDO AIA 304 (A.K.A. 304 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setSDO SDO Continuum (A.K.A. Continuum) (Collected with the HMI sensor)
SDO SDO Magnetogram (A.K.A. Magnetogram) (Collected with the HMI sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.