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.
Microflaring filament
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, IRIS
Filaments are made of long thin strands of plasma trapped in magnetic field. They become activated because of magnetic-reconnection type events near their feet or in loops lying below them. In this movie, a filament activation is seen in the middle of the observing frame, followed by flare ribbons - brightenings adjacent to the length of the filament, formed due to reconnection in low lying loops just above the filament.