The Sun as you have never seen it before

October 22, 2013 • 12:48 am

by Matthew Cobb

This gif (yes, that’s pronounced, etc ) was tw**ted by @Lizzie_Crouch. It shows the sun in different wavelengths. It was posted on this Tumblr blog, but as is often the case with Tumblr, there’s no indication of where it originally came from.

If anyone knows who made it, which are the wavelengths, and what we are actually seeing, especially in the blue/turquoise image, please post below. Our star certainly doesn’t look too happy – you can make out a pair of eyes and a snarling mouth, if you look long enough.

32 thoughts on “The Sun as you have never seen it before”

      1. If you’re a Dublin housewife of the late 1980s (IIRC) you can also drink a couple of bottles of it a day and then get arrested for drunk driving. I’ve sometimes wondered what the chemistry of it is but never had a bottle to read. One day I’ll remember when I’m in the supermarket.

      2. I thought it was excessively sweetened peanut butter.

        “Choosy bl*ggers choose Jiff!”

        I think #1 has it nailed – but here’s more info.

        The colored (coloured) images are from the “EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope)”, with the turquoise corresponding to EIT 171 imaging (171 angstroms, ~10^6 K). The black & white and yellow (looks like a visible spectrum image, not the ghosty-looking yellow one) are indeed MDI (Michelson Doppler Imager) magnetogram and continuum images, respectively.

        Anyone can pop onto the SOHO site, download images corresponding to the same time-frame, and make peanut butter with it, with a small amount of determination to learn how the peanut butter software works.

        1. Just for grins, I downloaded the lemon juice / sink scrubber and found it had 13 frames, a few of which looked more like images from the Mt. Wilson observatory. Apparently the MDI instrument on the SOHO has been succeeded by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory(SDO). So it looks to me like this bit of peanut butter was produced from a couple of different space-based and a few ground-based observations from the same time slice. I couldn’t find any info in the constituent jpgs to clue me in to when these frames were taken, though.

        1. My dad was a Unilever man (presumably still is, tho retired) so I always paid some attention to their brands and advertising. When Jif (surface cleaner) first appeared in Australia the ads said ‘…without scratching’, but very shortly after it was changed to ‘…without harsh scratching’. This was in the mid-70s, not long after laws were passed to prevent misleading advertising, which the ad agencies had a tough time adapting to. Of course the product is designed as a suspension of abrasive particles, so scratching is what it does.

      1. I am just waiting now for someone to post a solar photo with the faces Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey in it. There’s bound to be one, if you look hard enough.

          1. Anyone taking bets on whether there will be a Jeebus-in-a-pumpkin piece of paraidolia silliness? Or has it already happened?

    2. Agreed ; I remember seeing something like that when I was hunting around the site when the spacecraft went off on it’s wonderings in the early 2000’s. The aetherial blue image is a soft-X-ray image or extreme UV and the others are in different bands that the spacecraft images in.

  9. It used to be we got pictures in IR, VIS, UV, Xray based on the broad spectrum within each of these bands. SOHO, spectroscopically speaking, zoomed in on specific lines, e.g., heavily ionized Oxygen in the corona, and looked at fluorescence (sometimes XRF). Specific colors are associated with specific temperatures and chemicals (ionization species). The most remarkable feature about SOHO is that it can image these details using only a small fraction of the light coming from the sun. Likewise each image becomes a unique story about the dynamics on the sun at a particular energy, especially those dynamics associated with magnetic reonnection, i.e., those big loopy things you usually see bubblying near or on sun spots.

  12. Seems to me there’s an opportunity here for one of those artists who specialize in visualizing scientific data for coming up with a way of combining all those views into a single still frame. Compressing all those wavelengths into the visual spectrum would be quite a challenge, but probably very useful.

    b&

  13. Since the images are already pinned down, I choose to interpret “what we are actually seeing” in a wide way.

    – The reason that we see such a sharp edge on what is basically a heated slop of gas balanced between gravitational attraction and radiation pressure is that the surface is hot enough to still be a plasma. A plasma is opaque as the free electrons readily scatter photons and the resulting exponential steepness of opacity makes for a definite edge.

    This is important to understand the Cobe/WMAP/Planck images of the cosmic microwave background, which emanates from a similar last scattering of a (mostly) hydrogen plasma cloud.

    – In optical wavelengths we see a very definite limb darkening, while other wavelengths experience limb brightening.

    This is important to understand exoplanet transit methods, as it now appears ALMA will be able to see such transits in radio wavelengths [!].

    1. “This is important to understand the Cobe/WMAP/Planck images” and their dynamics. Because the plasma surface is so far away [a universal understatement] we can’t resolve better than ~ 100 year differences.

      But people that repeat Planck measurements in a hundred years will see that the CMB surface “boils” too when its features changes! I find that awesome, to be able to see dynamic features in a “fossil” relict that is ~ 45 billion lightyears away and ~ 14 billion years old.

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