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.
Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence at high FPS
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Roy T. Smart
Turbulence is thought to play an important role in heating the solar corona. However, it is difficult to observe since it often consists of small features that change very quickly compared to the typical framerate of IRIS. This Movie of the Day uses a special high-cadence mode of IRIS to capture a turbulent eruption in NOAA active region 13450. In the movie, we see sustained turbulent structures that eminate from the bright knot of material under the slit. In particular, intensity enhancements that appear to propagate along magnetic field lines are possibly consistent with plasmoids, a telltale signature of the tearing mode instability, thought to be ubiquitous in the solar atmosphere.