Filament Eruption Creates 'Canyon of Fire' on the Sun

  • Released Thursday, October 24th, 2013
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:51PM
  • ID: 11379

A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. Visualizers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. combined two days of satellite data to create a short movie of this gigantic event on the sun.

In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields.

These images were captured on Sept. 29-30, 2013, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which constantly observes the sun in a variety of wavelengths.

Different wavelengths help capture different aspect of events in the corona. The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun's magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption. The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious. By comparing this with the other colors, one sees that the two swirling ribbons moving farther away from each other are, in fact, the footprints of the giant magnetic field loops, which are growing and expanding as the filament pulls them upward.

Short video with music. The image is a composite of SDO AIA 171 and 304, with the two wavelengths blended in the area of the canyon.

Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel.

For complete transcript, click here.

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Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO


Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Tapes

This visualization originally appeared on the following tapes:
  • Canyon of Fire on the Sun (ID: 2013089)
    Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 4:00AM
    Produced by - Robert Crippen

Datasets used in this visualization

SDO AIA 171 (A.K.A. 171 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER
SDO AIA 193 (A.K.A. 193 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER
SDO AIA 304 (A.K.A. 304 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER

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.