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.
C4.3 Flare Breaks Through High Coronal Loops
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, P. R. Jibben (SAO)
Between the hours of 15-17 UT on 29 August 2014 a buildup of cool plasma off the solar limb in AR 12148 erupts, flinging plasma away from the Sun and sparking a C4.3 flare. Zooming out and looking at the corona (SDO/AIA 193), we can just make out the cool blob of plasma along with long arches of hot loops outlining coronal magnetic fields. From this viewpoint, we see the eruption didn't only fling cool plasma out into space, it significantly altered the coronal magnetic field in that region. An overlay of the IRIS data onto AIA shows how the violent eruption impacted the coronal loops as it was moving through the corona and away from the Sun. Combining high resolution chromospheric observations with coronal observations is important to understanding how flares occur and how they reshape the magnetic fields in their vicinity.