Voice off Screen: Scientists around the world have their eyes turned
to the sun this week as it reveals a massive active region that could affect
us here on Earth. And here joining us from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Maryland is Dr. Alex Young. Thank you for joining us.
Dr.Young: Thank you. Voice off Screen: So what is a sunspot and why
is this one so special? Dr.Young: Well sunspots are these regions
of really, really intense magnetic field, they're massive areas they're
slightly cooler than the surrounding sun so they appear dark.
This one is of great interest for us because it's the largest one we've
seen in almost 24 years. It's more than ten times
the size of the Earth.
Voice off Screen: Why do we want to learn more from this sunspot ? Dr.Young: Well,
this one is really intersting because generally sunspots of this size
produce a lot of activity that can have direct impact
on us here on Earth. This particular one
though its produced some activity, has not produced the kind of activity we
expected. So this has been a very intresting puzzle for
scientists to study, so that we can better understand sunspots in general.
Voice off Screen: Will it affect us here in Earth?
Dr.Young: The sunspots can throw out huge blasts of
light, we call solar flares, sometimes big blobs of material.
It doesn't impact us directly but all of this is
electromagnetic in nature and therefore it impacts our technology.
Sometimes it can disrupt communications, it can cause
problems with GPS and even impact our power grids
if the storms are strong enough. Voice off Screen: What is NASA doing
to understand sunspots better? Dr.Young: Well in particular we have
several spacecrafts such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory
which is looking at the sun twenty four hours a day providing
great amounts of data for us to study it. We also have this huge
fleet of spacecraft that is studying not just the sun,
but also the suns interaction with the Earth, the other planets
and throughout the solar system. Now, next year we're launching
a new mission called MMS, which is four spacecraft,
that is going to circle the Earth and study;
using the Earth's magnetic field study this particular
phenomenon that happens both at the Earth,
on the Sun and sunspots and also through the entire solar system.
Voice off Screen: Where can we learn more? Dr.Young: If you go to
nasa.gov/sunearth you can learn more about this
other missions and you can also find a lot of great imagery videos
and all sorts of articles about the kind of research we do
here at NASA. Voice off Screen: Dr. Alex Young thank you so much.
Dr.Young: Thank you.