Orange Sun Oozing
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May 22, 2007
If the universe seems cold from a distance, birthdays are part of its rebuttal.
Orange Sun Oozing
Birthday · May 22, 2007
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published May 22, 2007. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
The Sun's surface keeps changing. Click the central arrow and watch how the Sun's surface oozes during a single hour. The Sun's photosphere has thousands of bumps called granules and usually a few dark depressions called sunspots. The above time-lapse movie centered on Sunspot 875 was taken last year by the Vacuum Tower Telescope in the Canary Islands of Spain using adaptive optics to resolve details below 500 kilometers across. Each of the numerous granules is the size of an Earth continent, but much shorter lived. A granule slowly changes its shape over an hour, and can even completely disappear. Hot hydrogen gas rises in the bright center of a granule, and falls back into the Sun along a dark granule edge. The above movie and similar movies allow solar scientists to study how granules and sunspots evolve as well as how magnetic sunspot regions produce powerful solar flares.