Watch a complete hemisphere of the sun explode [Video]

In this ultraviolet light video taken by NASA, that you can watch a phenomenon that scientists didn’t believe could exist until a couple of months ago. A complete hemisphere of the sun explodes, one region igniting another. What does this discovery mean?

It turns out that the sun doesn’t just spurt out gouts of gas in isolated spots. The truth is, our star’s magnetic field brings many regions of Sol’s surface into direct relationships with each other, so areas separated by millions of miles can literally spark each other up. The implications are called ” sympathetic flares.”

According to a release from NASA:

For the past three months, [astrophysicist Karel] Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to grasp what happened in the course of the ” Great Eruption.” That they had a variety of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to provide commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the yank Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Explosions on the sun usually are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections-they’re able to go off without notice, hundreds of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem.

” To predict eruptions we will be able to not concentrate on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions,” says Title, ” we’ve to understand the skin magnetic field of practically the full sun.”

This revelation increases the work load for space weather forecasters, however also increases the prospective accuracy of their forecasts.

” The total-sun approach may lead to breakthroughs in predicting solar activity,” commented Rodney Viereck of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, CO. ” This in turn would offer improved forecasts to our customers equivalent to electric power grid operators and schedule carriers, who could take action to give protection to their systems and confirm the protection of passengers and crew.”

Read more about this remarkable Great Eruption via NASA .

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This post is tagged: space weather forecasters, space weather prediction, stereo spacecraft, unprecedented detail, weather prediction center