Sun ID: 11467

Deconstructing The Sun

Story by Karen Fox | Visualizations by Tom Bridgman Released on March 20, 2014

On January 28, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, spacecraft saw its strongest solar flare since it launched in 2013. Solar flares are bursts of X-rays and light that stream out into space, but no one yet knows the fine details of what sets them off. By observing a layer of the sun’s lower atmosphere called the chromosphere, which helps regulate how energy and material flows up from the sun's surface, IRIS can see part of the process that powers these events. However, there's a bit of luck involved in making such observations. IRIS’s instruments can’t look at the entire sun at once, so scientists must decide what areas might be the most interesting to watch. On January 28, scientists focused IRIS’s telescope and imaging spectrograph on a magnetically active region on the sun. Perfect timing: They witnessed a medium-sized solar flare in the act of erupting. Watch the video to see the flare through IRIS's eyes.

IRIS's imaging spectrograph provides spectra that show how solar material at different temperatures, velocities and densities flow.

For More Information

NASA.gov

Story Credits

Lead Visualizer/Animator:
Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)

Narrator:
Karen Fox (ADNET Systems, Inc.)

Producer:
Genna Duberstein (USRA)

Lead Scientists:
Adrian Daw (NASA/GSFC)
Bart De Pontieu (Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab)

Lead Writer:
Karen Fox (ADNET Systems, Inc.)

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

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11467

Keywords:
DLESE >> Narrated
SVS >> App
NASA Science >> Sun