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.
C class solar flare in AR 12826
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Milan Gosic
During its regular monitoring of solar active regions, IRIS observed a series of explosive events in AR 12826. The most prominent one occurred at the solar limb around 09:55 UT on 28-May-2021. This event has been classified as a C3.0 class flare, visible as a sudden flash of light at the beginning of the movie. During flares, a large amount of magnetic energy is released and transferred into heating of the chromosphere and corona. Few seconds after the flare, we see numerous bright pixels across the images. Those bright pixels are not caused by the flare. They happen whenever high energy particles hit our CCD camera when IRIS is passing through the Earth's radiation belts.