NASA RELEASES STUNNING NEW 3-D VIEWS OF THE SUN

23 Apr 2007

SPACE.COM (Jeanna Bryner, Staff Writer) reports that scientists unveiled today some of the first 3-D images of the violent electrical storms that rage within the Sun’s atmosphere.

In the new images, the electrified loops and charged particles that blow from the Sun’s surface seem to come to life. Besides the oohs-and-aahs, the results will help scientists track powerful solar eruptions and predict how they could affect Earth, similar to hurricane-tracking.

The pictures were snapped with two nearly identical observatories that orbit the Sun in tandem. Called STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory), the spacecraft were launched in October 2006, but it wasn’t until the end of March that the two observatories were separated by enough distance to allow them to generate the 3-D pictures. The technique is similar to how the offset between your eyes provides you with depth perception.

Solar storm trackers

In particular, the observatories have their eyes on coronal mass ejections, which are violent eruptions that carry massive amounts of electrically charged gas called plasma from the Sun’s atmosphere. Once unleashed, these plasma clouds race away from the Sun at up to a million miles per hour.

Among the new images is one showing a plasma cloud lifting off the solar surface.

“Coronal mass ejections you might think of as analogous to hurricanes here on Earth,” said STEREO project scientist Michael Kaiser of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md. Meteorologists are now able to predict with much accuracy which storms on Earth will turn into hurricanes and when and where they could make landfall.

“We are trying to do the same thing with these coronal mass ejections,” Kaiser said.

The coronal mass ejections headed toward Earth are particularly tricky to track because the spacecraft “watching” them sit directly in front of the Sun.

“It’s almost like somebody blowing a smoke ring at you from across the room and trying to predict how fast it’s moving,” Kaiser told SPACE.com. “What you need is somebody on either side of the room looking at that same smoke ring and they can triangulate on it.”

That’s what STEREO’s two observatories do. The results could make space weather easier to predict.

See also: www.nasa.gov/stereo

[Thanks to BM.com]

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