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.
Loops above a flaring region
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Ramada Sukarmadji
The solar atmosphere is filled with complex magnetic structures especially when active regions are present. In this video, we can see coronal loops (the loop-like structures or arches) catastrophically cooling after being heated to tens of millions of degrees during a flare. They appear as expanding upwards through the solar atmosphere as more and more cooling loops stack above each other. These loops can be as cool as 10000 degrees K (which is considered cool in comparison to the temperature of the solar atmosphere) and reach up to 60000 km (if not, more) when measured from the surface of the sun; this is around 5 times the diameter of the earth! They may look small on the surface of the sun, but in reality, they are massive compared to us.