Photo # 2 (Sep 2010)

THE NOT SO QUIET SUN

The final mystery is oneself.
When one has weighed the Sun in the balance,
and measured the steps of the moon
and mapped out the seven heavens star by star,
there still remains oneself.

                           - Arthur Schopenhauer

Credit: NASA / Goddard / SDO AIA Team

After a long solar minimum, the Sun is no longer so quiet. On August 1, this extreme ultraviolet snapshot of the Sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a complex burst of activity playing across the Sun's northern hemisphere. The false-color image shows the hot solar plasma at temperatures ranging from 1 to 2 million kelvins. Along with the erupting filaments and prominences, a small(!) solar flare spawned in the active region at the left was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME), a billion-ton cloud of energetic particles headed for planet Earth. Making the 93 million mile trip in only two days, the CME impacted Earth's magnetosphere, triggering a geomagnetic storm and both northern and southern auroral displays.

The sun is a dynamic, living organism with cyclical shifts in its energies that we have barely begun to comprehend.

As Schopenhauer observes, all of our outward perceptions, interactions and pondeings remind us of our own inner searches for understanding our place in the universe.

                                - Dan Benor, MD