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.
Evolution of solar pores
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Milan Gosic
Solar pores are magnetic structures where intense magnetic field emerges through the solar surface and inhibits convection from the solar interior. This reduces temperature within the pores and makes them looking darker than the bubbles of hot gas around them. Contrary to sunspots, the pores do not develop the surrounding hotter penumbra organized in radial bright and dark filaments. Solar pores are important for understanding the evolution of strong magnetic features on the Sun, but it is difficult to capture their entire lifetime. During the first week of March 2021, IRIS tracked an active region in which several pores were observed from the moment they appeared on the solar surface until they completely disappeared.