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Narrator: Hello, I'm Nicholeen Viall, and I'm

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a solar physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

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What we're looking at right now is imagery from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

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All of the dynamics and activty that's going on in the

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solar corona, the sun's atmosphere, which is what I study.

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What we're seeing here is a filament and it looks very

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dark and it looks like it's actually maybe even on the surface of the sun.

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But we can see as the sun rotates around that actually it's

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suspended high up in the atmosphere, away from the surface. When viewed from

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this angle, we call them prominences. This material is

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held up in the corona by twisted magnetic fields

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We're looking at the solar corona in extreme ultraviolet

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at 171 Angstroms, which is a wavelength that our

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eyes cannot see. My favorite thing is all of these

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magnetic loops that you can see on the sun, how dynamic

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these magnetic loops are, just telling us how much change

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and evolution and activity there is on the sun at all scales.

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We can see on the northern part

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of the sun that a prominence rotates onto the disk of the sun

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and then it erupts in a giant coronal mass ejection, and

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all of that magnetic energy and all of the plasma that was trapped on those magnetic field

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lines launches out into the solar system.

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We're watching the sun rotate right now, this is one of the basic features of the sun, and

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it takes about a month for sun to rotate fully around and to see the

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same spot on the sun come back. We're seeing the sun

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rotate so quickly in this movie because it's timelapsed.

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When the sun jumps around, that's actually

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the Solar Dynamics Observatory moving around and pointing

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different directions. Sometimes they have to point away from the sun so

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that they can calibrate their sensors, the cameras.

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When we see the frames go dark, that's eclipse

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season, so that's when the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is orbiting the Earth,

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goes behind the Earth, and the Earth is between the Solar

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Dynamics Observatory and the sun, and so the Earth eclipses the images.

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These really bright spots, called

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active regions, have concentrated magnetic field and

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concentrated heating because of this extra magnetic field and the extra energy

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due to it. There are more active regions during solar maximum,

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and fewer active regions during solar minimum. And often these active regions

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can lead to solar eruptions such as solar flares and

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coronal mass ejections.

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I study the coronal heating problem. That is why

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the solar corona so much hotter than the solar surface below it.

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And we know that it has to do with the magnetic field, which is

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constantly dynamic and evolving and injecting

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energy into the solar corona, and you can really get a sense of that when you

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watch these Solar Dynamics Observatory movies.

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