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[ music ]

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NASA's new IRIS telescope keeps a close watch on small

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areas of the Sun at a time. On January 28th,

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2014, IRIS caught a huge burst of X-ray light,

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a solar flare. This is the largest flare IRIS has seen so far.

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IRIS peers into a dynamic region of the Sun called the chromosphere,

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better than has ever been done before. The moving vertical

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line on the images is part of an instrument that allows scientists to look

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at specific temperatures of solar material at a time. That kind of individualized

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temperature data is called spectra, and scientists can use it to map how the

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material in the flare is moving around in unprecedented detail.

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[ beep beep... beep beep... ]

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[ beep beep... ]

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