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.
A Solar Reawakening
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Chad Madsen, SAO
This video shows the first M-class flare observed by IRIS for solar cycle 25. A flare is a sudden and violent burst of stored up magnetic energy and is among the most energetic phenomena in the Solar System. We classify flares using a letter system based on the amount of x-rays they produce. From least to most x-rays, the classes are A, B, C, M, and X. The two most energetic flare classes, M and X, are somewhat rare and are generally observed in and around solar maximum, the most active part of the Sun's 11-year magnetic cycle. The current solar cycle started about two years ago with the Sun slumbering in the calm of solar minimum. However, this M-class flare shows that the Sun is starting to reawaken as its magnetic field becomes increasingly more complex and tangled. This cycle's solar maximum isn't expected until 2025, but the Sun certainly seems prepared to give us an entertaining warm-up act in the meantime.