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.
Cold prominence suspended in the hot atmosphere
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Vanessa Polito
This video shows a solar prominence, a bubble of cold material (~5000-80000 Kelvin) that is suspended in the hot (>1 million Kelvin) solar atmosphere. "Quiescent" solar prominences like the one showed in this movie can last for hours or days, and it is not clear what sustains them for such a long time. Understanding how prominences are produced and sustained in the solar atmosphere as well as investigating their peculiar observational features (such as instability flows, vortices and "bubbles", some of these visible in this video) still remain active topics of solar physics research.