Coronal Holes at Solar Minimum and Solar Maximum
- Visualizations by:
- Tom Bridgman
- View full credits
Coronal holes are large dark regions in the solar atmosphere that appear in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray wavelength imagery.
These holes are created by large regions of the solar magnetic field that have a single polarity (unipolar) and extend far out into the solar system. These are sometimes called 'open' magnetic field lines since they don't connect back to the Sun. The regions appear dark because they have a lower density of the hot coronal plasma. The open magnetic field lines make it easy for the charged plasma to stream away from the Sun, forming the fast component (about 700 kilometers per second) of the solar wind.
Coronal holes can form at any time during the 11-year solar cycle but are more prominent near solar minimum when persistent coronal holes can form near the Sun's polar regions. Coronal holes can grow and migrate to lower solar latitudes.
These holes are created by large regions of the solar magnetic field that have a single polarity (unipolar) and extend far out into the solar system. These are sometimes called 'open' magnetic field lines since they don't connect back to the Sun. The regions appear dark because they have a lower density of the hot coronal plasma. The open magnetic field lines make it easy for the charged plasma to stream away from the Sun, forming the fast component (about 700 kilometers per second) of the solar wind.
Coronal holes can form at any time during the 11-year solar cycle but are more prominent near solar minimum when persistent coronal holes can form near the Sun's polar regions. Coronal holes can grow and migrate to lower solar latitudes.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
Visualizer
- Tom Bridgman (GST) [Lead]
Producer
- Joy Ng (KBRwyle)
Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
SDO AIA 193 (A.K.A. 193 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setNote: 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.
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