On February 11, 2010, NASA launched a small spacecraft toward the Sun as one of the space agency’s initial efforts to understand our host star.
And for now, no one knows the Sun better than the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The spacecraft has been staring at the star non-stop for 10 years, and taking a picture of the Sun every 0.75 seconds.
Over the past decade, the observatory has captured 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, allowing NASA to create a time span of solar activity that spans 10 years. The space agency released the video this month, and it is available in the public domain.
The resulting images are a 61-minute hypnotic video that captures the beauty of the bright star, and every second represents a full day on Earth.
The video shows the Sun erupting with explosive solar activity that rises and falls throughout its 11-year cycle.
The solar cycle is measured by changes in the sun’s activity. The Sun periodically expels boiling plasma, in the form of solar flares and solar wind, through the Solar System.
The Sun’s activity begins to increase mid-cycle and that means more solar flares and the radiation output from our host star. However, as this solar cycle ends, the Sun becomes less active.
However, scientists are still unsure why each solar cycle lasts approximately 11 years, or how it is generated.
There are certain moments in the hour-long video that show some significant events in the Sun’s activity. At 6:20, a massive eruption erupts from the lower right side of the Sun seen as a cloud of particles rising from the surface of the Sun. Sun and go back down. Another massive eruption takes place at 1:50 p.m., this time from the lower left side of the Sun.
And at 43:20, a large group of sunspots can be seen crossing the face of the Sun over a period of two weeks. Sunspots are dark spots that mark the surface of the sun. They are caused by the magnetic field that inhibits the transfer of energy on the Sun’s surface through the convection process, where the hot fluid rises and the colder fluid sinks.
At 12:24, you can see a very fast speed of Venus across the screen as it transits the face of the Sun, while Mercury transits the Sun at 36:18, and then makes a second appearance at 57:38. .
While the Solar Dynamics Observatory had its eyes fixed on the fascinating star for the past ten years, it inevitably missed a few moments, as evidenced by some very brief dark frames. These missing moments are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing the spacecraft as they transit between the Sun and the space observatory.
Meanwhile, those small faults when the Sun is off-center were images captured while the Solar Dynamics Observatory was calibrating its instruments.
The Sun has been around for around 4.5 billion years, and will probably remain for another 5 billion years or so. And yet we have scarcely scratched the boiling surface to understand this elusive star and its explosive activity.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory will continue to closely monitor the Sun for years to come in hopes of learning more about our host star.
