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Blogs > loveisamyth > loveisamyth, stars are forever |
SCORPION WITH A MAGNETIC TAIL As the face of the sun grows quiet, attention is turning to the edge of the sun. "The spotless sun put out a large, fast moving prominence today, a loop that rose and disappeared quickly," reports astrophotographer Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York. "Frozen in time it looks a bit like a scorpion, no?" Prominences are filaments of magnetism filled with glowing-hot plasma. They attract attention when they grow large and hang out over the edge of the solar disk. The magnetic tail of this scorpion is more than 150,000 km long! Even when sunspots vanish, magnetic filaments are known to crisscross the solar disk. Sometimes they collapse and hit the stellar surface, igniting explosions called Hyder Flares. Readers should expect to see more of these structures as sunspots fade away. Solar Minimum is not boring , only different. Stay tuned for more "quiet." . |
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