Thursday, February 13, 2025

January 30, 2020

Sit Back And Take In This Superb High-Res Video Of The Sun’s Surface

The US National Solar Observatory has released a video of the highest resolution observations of the sun's surface, ever recorded.
Surface-of-sun

One shouldn’t stare directly at the sun.

We all know this, and by ‘we’ I mean everyone on the planet except Donald Trump, who looked at the sun twice during a solar eclipse. 

Sigh.

While we can’t look at the sun with the naked eye, or get anywhere near it in space, science has found ways to study it, and even photograph it, from Earth.

Most recently, The National Solar Observatory (NSO) published a video of the sun’s surface, which it’s describing as the highest resolution footage ever captured.

Here’s Mashable:

The NSO was able to capture “features” as small as 18 miles, the furthest we’ve been able to zoom in on the star at the center of our solar system.

The resulting video looks almost like a honey comb come alive. But actually, it “shows the turbulent, ‘boiling’ gas that covers the entire sun.” The woozy rectangles that look like cells are basically the bubbles that result from heat and plasma moving around as the sun’s energy churns; by the way, each of those “cells” is apparently about the size of Texas.

Take it all in:

Does anyone else want popcorn now?

[source:mashable]