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VIDEO: NASA's new IRIS satellite captures solar flare 7 times the size of Earth
Interface Region Imaging Spectograph (IRIS) with solar wings deployed in B/159.
(
Jim Dowdall
)
Image of a massive solar flare captured on video by NASA's new IRIS satellite.
(
NASA
)
Now you can get up close and personal with a solar flare. From the safety of your home computer screen or mobile device, of course.
Thanks to NASA's new Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, we can now view high resolution images of the violent explosions that occur regularly on the sun. One explosion, captured in the video below, is equal to five Earths in width and about seven-and-a-half Earths in height. In other words, massive.
According to NASA, the so-called "curtain" of fire erupts at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour.
The IRIS satellite was launched in June 2013 to send back images from low levels of the sun's atmosphere at the highest resolution ever. We've seen NASA video of such coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, before, but never this close up. Take this image from 2012, a year before the launch of IRIS:
A bit of luck was involved in getting this image, as scientist had to guess at where to point IRIS's eye.
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"We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME," said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory, in a statement. "And then we wait and hope that we'll catch something. This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited."
The line traversing the video is also not an accident. That line is actually a slit representing the entrance for IRIS's spectrograph, a device that splits light into different wavelengths and allows scientists to measure temperature, velocity and density of the solar material.
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