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.
Mini-filament eruption with a large prominence nearby
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Chunming Zhu
Filaments/prominences are relatively cool and dense ionized gases floating in the hot solar corona. In this movie from IRIS, a small-scale filament, also known as mini-filament, rises and expands, with a large prominence likely as the background. The slit of the raster happens to scan through the mini-filament eruption, and thus may contribute to additional knowledge about its physical properties and motions by learning the spectrograph.