Watch NASA’s Video of the Sun’s Cascading Magnetic Arches

The Sun isn’t uniformly sunny up close, and is peppered with dark spots all over, because the surface is full of magnetic loops, and in some places the gas is cooler and therefore darker.
Jonathan Zhou
1/19/2016
Updated:
1/19/2016

The Sun isn’t uniformly sunny up close, and is peppered with dark spots all over, because the surface is full of magnetic loops, and in some places the gas is cooler and therefore darker.

In December, a dark solar filament above the sun’s surface became unstable and erupted, generating a cascade of magnetic arches.

“The arches of solar material appear to glow as they emit light in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, highlighting the charged particles spinning along the sun’s magnetic field lines,” NASA said in a blog post.

“This video was taken in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths of 193 angstroms, a type of light that is typically invisible to our eyes, but is colorized here in bronze.”