See the Sun's Active Region: The Source of the Early-February Flares

  • Released Friday, February 27, 2026
View full credits

This video condenses nine days of solar activity into 12 minutes, playing 1,080 times faster than real time.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO.

Music Credit: “Atomic Drift,” “Echoes of the Unknown,” and “Particle Reverie” from the album Molecular Echoes. Written and produced by Lars Leonhard.

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

Complete transcript available.

At the beginning of February, 2026, an extremely dynamic active region on the Sun rotated into view of Earth. For nearly two weeks, this active region, designated AR4366, produced intense solar flares. These eruptions were observed by multiple spacecraft, including NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).


Launched in 2010, SDO monitors the Sun continuously in 10 wavelengths of light. This video shows the Sun from Feb. 1–9 in extreme ultraviolet light at 171 angstroms. This wavelength reveals the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, at temperatures of about 600,000 kelvin (roughly 1 million degrees Fahrenheit, or about 540,000 degrees Celsius).

The imagery highlights bright, looping arcs of hot plasma shaped by powerful magnetic fields rising from AR4366. These magnetic fields store and release energy that drives solar flares and other solar activity. During the span of this video, AR4366 produced six X-class flares — the most powerful category — and 75 M-class flares, the next strongest level.
As the active region crossed the Sun’s disk, it offered a striking view of the Sun’s magnetic complexity and the dynamic forces that shape space weather throughout the solar system.

This video condenses nine days of solar activity into just four minutes, playing 3,240 times faster than real time.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO.

Music Credit: “Atomic Drift” from the album Molecular Echoes. Written and produced by Lars Leonhard.

Complete transcript available.

This short video, in both vertical and horizontal formats, condenses nine days of solar activity into just 1:20, playing 9,720 times faster than real time.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO.

Music Credit: “Atomic Drift” from the album Molecular Echoes. Written and produced by Lars Leonhard.

Complete transcript available.

Credits

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

Missions

This page is related to the following missions:

Series

This page can be found in the following series:

This page was originally published on Friday, February 27, 2026.
This page was last updated on Friday, February 27, 2026 at 7:42 AM EST.