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.
The Plasma Whirlpool
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, SAO, Chad Madsen
In this video, we see two flares on the west limb of the Sun, some of the most violent phenomena in the Solar System. The first flare expels a massive blob of plasma outward, but the Sun's magnetic field catches it like a net and prevents it from escaping into interplanetary space. As the captive blob relaxes back towards the Sun, an unusual structure begins to form: a whirlpool of rotating plasma close to the limb. The whirlpool travels southward as it swirls mesmerizing in a counter-clockwise manner and seemingly dissipates as the blob returns home. However, when another flare goes off shortly afterwards, we see the whirlpool spool up much of the ejected material. The whirlpool is likely a signature of solar plasma interacting with the Sun's complicated magnetic field. Although we have seen whirlpools like these before, this is the first time we've seen one emerge from a flare.