'X' Marks the Spot: SDO Observes a Reconnection Event
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- Visualizations by:
- Tom Bridgman
- View full credits
This is the source data material for the main release of X Marks the Spot: SDO Sees Reconnection.
Frames were generated using the standard SDO AIA 131 Å color table and an enhanced version to reveal the finer details of the coronal loops, which are overly saturated in the standard color table ranges.
Credits
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.
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Animator
- Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Gordon D. Holman (NASA/GSFC)
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Producer
- Genna Duberstein (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Papers used in this visualization
Datasets used in this visualization
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SDO AIA 131 (131 Filter)
ID: 730This dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
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.
Related Pages
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ID: 11199 Produced Video
X Marks the Spot: SDO Sees Reconnection
Read moreTwo NASA spacecraft have provided the most comprehensive movie ever of a mysterious process at the heart of all explosions on the sun: magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection happens when magnetic field lines come together, break apart, and then exchange partners, snapping into new positions and releasing a jolt of magnetic energy. This process lies at the heart of giant explosions on the sun such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can fling radiation and particles across the solar system. Magnetic field lines, themselves, are invisible, but the sun's charged plasma particles course along their length. Space telescopes can see that material appearing as bright lines looping and arcing through the sun’s atmosphere, and so map out the presence of magnetic field lines. Looking at a series of images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), scientists saw two bundles of field lines move toward each other, meet briefly to form what appeared to be an “X” and then shoot apart with one set of lines and its attendant particles leaping into space and one set falling back down onto the sun. To confirm what they were seeing, the scientists turned to a second NASA spacecraft, the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). RHESSI collects spectrograms, a kind of data that can show where exceptionally hot material is present in any given event on the sun. RHESSI showed hot pockets of solar material forming above and below the reconnection point, an established signature of such an event. By combining the SDO and RHESSI data, the scientists were able to describe the process of what they were seeing, largely confirming previous models and theories, while revealing new, three-dimensional aspects of the process. ||
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