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.
Dancing Prominence
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Tiago M. D. Pereira
In this movie IRIS is observing a prominence at the solar limb. A prominence consists of cool gas at coronal heights. In this example the gas is unstable and unsure what to do: the natural tendency is for it to fall back down into the solar surface, but strong magnetic forces push the gas upwards, resulting in a "dancing" or "shaking" motion. The IRIS slit is seen as the vertical black stripe; it quickly scans the region, providing highly detailed spectra that give unprecedented detail into the physics of prominences. These observations were taken on 12 May 2016.