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.
Dueling active region eruptions
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Sean Brannon
The battle is on between eruptions in Active Region 12835. In this observation from June 29 2021, IRIS captures a series of small eruptions from two different erupting locations, to the left and right of the IRIS spectrograph slit (the dark line running vertically down the center). First, the right-hand location erupts, followed shortly by the left-hand side, and then the action continues to shift back-and-forth for the duration of the observation. Small eruptions like these are believed to be the result of a process called magnetic reconnection, which releases pent-up energy stored within the Sun's magnetic field. Since both locations erupt multiple times, this active region must have plenty of stored energy. While there's no clear winner between these two, we the observers definitely have a winning view of the process.