Cool Video of the Day

NASA's latest video is called "Canyon of Fire on the Sun" and, not only is it neat to watch, it's a bit scary all at the same time.

Science: It's what's rocking your eyeballs!

Awesome video.

I need to convert that into a slide show for my windows desktop or something.

Heliophysics is a damn sexy field to be in. Lots and LOTS of grant money and private funding plus we still know so little about stars and their everyday functions and even exactly how they reach the point of of nuclear fusion.

Love it.

Neat. But it would have been a hell of a lot neater if somebody was explaining what we were looking at! Some type of solar flare, i imagine, but what do i know.

NASA's music sounds like something from a Cinemax softcore porn.

Is is true that Superman can survive flying into the Sun?

I wonder what would happen if a sun collided with another sun, or if a planet collided with a sun.

That was cool to watch on my 50 inch Sony TV at 1080P Full Screen.

Really cool video of the day. Are you sure you meant to say really cool video of the night? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

That's Hot...

The Metroid Prime-esque music really set the mood while viewing the video for me.

It's amazing how active and yet so intangible our universe is outside the speck of dust that is our planet..

spugnor said:

Neat. But it would have been a hell of a lot neater if somebody was explaining what we were looking at! Some type of solar flare, i imagine, but what do i know.

Click to expand...

A massive CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) which is a large burst of plasma from the surface generally caused by weeks if not months of great tension across the huge magnetic fields arcing over the entire area.

Considering the Sun is now going into its 13 year hibernation cycle (Solar max is now over , basically and Solar min has started) its pretty cool to see it still doing amazing things even towards its lull.

The interesting part of this incoming Solar cycle is that Sunspots have dramatically dropped in quantity compared to a normal Solar minimum cycle. And we might be in for a much lower amount of activity over the next 2-3 cycles compared to their normal activity. Which would mean we could be facing another Maunder Minimum.

Information on that : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

A mini ice age for the TL;DR types. What is not so great is that not to long (about 140 years give or take) after the Maunder Minimum we had largest Solar flare ever recorded in human history (it would instantly knock us back into the stone age for a while).

Solar weather prediction is now just as important as Earth weather prediction and both are tied together in many ways as more and more confirmation is resulting from studies involving the two.

Those CMEs are pretty amazing. It doesn't look like much, but that ejected matter can be millions of tons worth.