Talked with a solar astronomer at the Griffith Observatory last weekend

I always thought all those sun photos looked the same. Just a yellow ball with some dots. But this guy showed me a picture of a prominence erupting. It was 10 times the size of Earth. He explained how those loops are magnetic fields holding plasma. That hit me different because I never thought about the scale. Now I actually look at the details in every solar photo I see. Anyone else have a moment where a scientist changed how you look at a picture?

2 comments

2 Comments

james_martin937d ago

The 10-times-Earth-size part got me too. I saw a timelapse of a coronal mass ejection at a NASA event once and it looked like slow motion chaos. The scientist there pointed out how fast it was actually moving, like millions of miles per hour. Now I can't unsee the scale when I look at solar images. That magnetic loop thing is wild too, like the sun has its own invisible skeleton. Did they show you the one where the prominence breaks off and looks like a tree? That one blew my mind.

campbell.logan6d ago

That "invisible skeleton" line is exactly how I feel about those magnetic loops, it's like the sun is flexing its own weird muscles. Speaking of wild scale, I once saw a photo of a sunspot next to a picture of Jupiter and it made me realize we're just floating on a speck in comparison. That tree prominence sounds insane, I gotta look that up now because I can't picture a solar tree breaking off without it looking like something from a sci-fi movie.