IRIS Movie of the Day
At least once a week a movie of the Sun taken by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is posted by one of the scientists operating the instrument.
Several Flares near Sunspot
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Jake Parker
Sunspots, the dark black features in this video, mark regions of the sun with strong magnetic field and are often associated with solar activity. This particular active region, AR 12017, produces several smaller flares and one large X-class flare as the strong magnetic field of the sunspot interacts with the magnetic field around it and searches for a lower energy state.