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.
Dynamic prominence on the east solar limb
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Milan Gosic
On 19-June-2020 IRIS observed a dynamic prominence on the east limb. Prominences are made of a cool and dense ionized gas, and surrounded by a million Kelvin hot corona. They may undergo instabilities that lead to their destabilization and one or more eruptions. In this movie, we can see an example of such an eruption and the subsequent fall of the ejected plasma. Bright pixels that stand out clearly in some frames are not caused by solar radiation but happen whenever high energy particles hit the CCD camera while IRIS is passing through the Earth's radiation belts.