Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)

I was doing my usual browsing around the internet, looking for interesting news, and I came across this. This is a time lapse taken by the SOHO satellite, which sits at a very unique point in space where Earth and the Sun's gravity "cancel out" (This is called a Lagrangian point, and there are in fact 5 of them). This results in the satellite always lying between the Earth and the sun, which makes it an ideal spot to watch the sun from. In these images, they block out the sun (as it would saturate the image), so that we can see the active corona (hence the image is called a coronagraph).

Here we can see something called a coronal mass ejection (CME). The Sun's surface is a rather turbulent place, since it is not solid like the Earth's. This results in magnetic fields getting twisted together to form "closed loops", kind of like a net, which traps plasma. Eventually when the plasma pressure exceeds the magnetic pressure, the net bursts, spewing out billions of tons of very energetic radiation (+-800km/s). This particular one, luckily, was not pointed towards the Earth.

Things are like this are going to become more and more frequent as we head into the period known as solar max (the sun is most active during this) which will peak next year.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, that horizontal bright line to the left of the sun, is mercury. It appears so bright to the camera that light bleeds into adjacent pixels.

Lunar eclipse this week

This week Wednesday (15 June) there will be a total lunar eclipse occurring, and us in South Africa are in a favourable position to view it. A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon, casting Earth's shadow on the moon. This will peak at around 22:12 on Wednesday night, causing the moon to appear a dull red colour. Anyone with nothing to do that night should definately keep an eye on the moon, as this is a fairly rare event. Maybe even a romantic evening picnic is in order...