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.
Evolution of a solar filament
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Milan Gosic
Filaments are structures of cool and dense ionized gas in the upper solar atmosphere. They are one of the priority observing targets for IRIS. On Nov 23rd and Nov 24th, IRIS was observing a slowly decaying filament, which is visible in the IRIS Mg II k spectral line. As we scan across this line, we can see the photosphere, climb up the solar atmosphere and detect the filament. The movie is composed of four series of rasters taken at around 11/23 08:30, 11/23 11:40, 11/24 05:30, and 11/24 15:15, and follows the same part of the filament. This type of observations allow us to study how the solar filaments are formed and evolve with time.