NASA's SDO Watches Giant Filament on the Sun

A snaking, extended filament of solar material currently lies on the front of the sun– some 1 million miles across from end to end. Filaments are clouds of solar material suspended above the sun by powerful magnetic forces. Though notoriously unstable, filaments can last for days or even weeks.

A dark snaking line in the upper right of the sun in this image on Sept. 30, 2014, shows a filament of solar material hovering above the sun’s surface. NASA’s SDO captured the image in extreme UV light. The Earth is shown to scale.
Image Credit:
NASA/SDO

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NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun 24 hours a day, has observed this gigantic filament for several days as it rotated around with the sun. If straightened out, the filament would reach almost across the whole sun, about 1 million miles or 100 times the size of Earth.

What is the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

The Solar Dynamics Observatory is the first mission to be launched for NASA’s Living With a Star (LWS) Program, a program designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

SDO’s goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity’s technological systems by determining

> how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured

> how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.

SDO launched on February 11, 2010, 10:23 am EST on an Atlas V from SLC 41 from Cape Canaveral. SDO will study how solar activity is created and how Space Weather comes from that activity. Measurements of the interior of the Sun, the Sun’s magnetic field, the hot plasma of the solar corona, and the irradiance that creates the ionospheres of the planets are our primary data products.

You can get loads more information from the SDO site and about its missions here.

SDO captured images of the filament in numerous wavelengths, each of which helps highlight material of different temperatures on the sun. By looking at any solar feature in different wavelengths and temperatures, scientists can learn more about what causes such structures, as well as what catalyzes their occasional giant eruptions out into space.

A dark snaking line in the upper right of these images on Sept. 30, 2014, show a filament of solar material hovering above the sun’s surface. NASA’s SDO captured the images in extreme UV light – different colors represent different wavelengths of light and different temperatures of solar material.
Image Credit:
NASA/SDO

Look at the images to see how the filament appears in different wavelengths. The brownish combination image was produced by blending two wavelengths of extreme UV light with a wavelength of 193 and 335 Angstroms. The red image shows the 304 Angstrom wavelength of extreme UV light.

– NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO captured this video of the filament in 193 Angstrom wavelength. Credit: NASA/SDO/S. Image Credit: NASA/SDO/Steele Hill –

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For more awesome pictures and videos of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, click here.

Credit: Steele Hill

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

For more information, visit: NASA

NASA's SDO Watches Giant Filament on the Sun