RHESSI and TRACE View of January 20, 2005 Solar Flare

  • Released Tuesday, May 24, 2005
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RHESSI spacecraft images of gamma-rays (blue) and X-rays (red) thrown off by the hottest part of the flare are shown with UV images from the TRACE spacecraft. The gamma rays are made by energetic protons at the Sun. Scientists were surprised that the gamma rays matched the energy spectrum of protons at Earth: the proton storm may have come directly from the Sun and not from the CME as anticipated.

Movie with co-registered TRACE and RHESSI imagery

As the TRACE imager saturates, we see multiple hot-spots at the loop footpoints in RHESSI.

As the TRACE imager saturates, we see multiple hot-spots at the loop footpoints in RHESSI.

Closeup of AR 10720. Blue high-energy emission marks the footpoints of the coronal loops. The lower-energy red emission is from the loop structure. See note below under ImageMods.

Closeup of AR 10720. Blue high-energy emission marks the footpoints of the coronal loops. The lower-energy red emission is from the loop structure. See note below under ImageMods.

For More Information

See http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/solar_fireworks.html

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Others who provided data and consultations: Karl Battams (NRL), Brian Dennis (NASA/GSFC), Sam Krucker (University of California at Berkeley)

This page was originally published on Tuesday, May 24, 2005.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:56 PM EDT.

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

  • [RHESSI: X-ray Imaging Spectrometer]

    ID: 101
    Sensor: X-ray Imaging Spectrometer Dates used: 2005/01/20T06:20:13 - 2005/01/20T07:26:00

    The RHESSI instrument is an imaging spectrometer observing the Sun at X-ray to gamma-rays (photon energies of 3 keV to 17 MeV) at time resolutions of a few seconds. (eV stands for "electron volt" and is a unit of energy. Note that photons of visible light have energies of 2-3 eV. 1 keV is a thousand electron volts and 1 MeV is a million electron volts.

    This dataset can be found at: http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/hessi/

    See all pages that use this dataset

  • 1600 Angstroms [TRACE: Optical Telescope]

    ID: 612
    Sensor: Optical Telescope Dates used: 2005/01/20T06:20:00 - 2005/01/20T08:43:57
    See all pages that use this dataset

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.