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.
Flares, flows and eruptions in a solar active region
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Paola Testa
This IRIS observation of the solar active region AR 12665 on 2017/07/09, for about 6 hours, shows several phenomena observed in solar active regions, including several small flares, eruptions and plasma flows. This active region had complex magnetic field configuration and evolution, causing a significant level of activity, including larger flares not captured by this observations. The IRIS slit (observed as a dark vertical line in the images of this movie) scans the region and captures several different portions of the observed flares and eruptions. The corresponding IRIS spectra provide important diagnostics of the plasma properties of the emitting material, including its velocity and density.