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.
X class flare
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Bart De Pontieu
IRIS caught the violent release of magnetic energy associated with an X-class flare on Oct 26, 2014. This was one of several large flares produced by the same active region during the last week of October in 2014. The flare ribbons are the bright sites of energy deposition in the low solar atmosphere that are rapidly heated from thousands of degrees to ten million degrees.