Welcome to Sky Candy for the week of — is this the first week of January? December 30? December 29? Calendars are so confusing. In any case, it’s another week's Sky Candy, and pleasantly it’s actually on Friday this week instead of Sunday.
This week I’m focusing on aurorae, basically because there have been so many of them, and they’ve been so cool. For example, this little video.
The last couple of weeks have been interesting — and not in the sense of interesting times, at least astronomically. But the Sun seems to have gotten into a rambunctious mood, getting as wild as a six-month-old ginger kitten (one of which has been making my life interesting, but that’s a story for another time).
This has been a week of many “Professor Carrington, call your office” posts at Instapundit, with many very intense solar flares. Luckily the biggest ones weren’t actually aimed at Earth, but they were very visible to the various solar observatories and solar telescopes.
They have been big enough to throw tremendous amounts of solar s— solar stuff at Earth.
The latest far side full halo CME looks quite spectacular in LASCO C3 imagery. The CME is quite symmetric, slighly lopsided to the W, suggesting the source region is close to / approaching the central meridian on the far side. We are definitely missing out. pic.twitter.com/gtl9gQv5Nk
— Jure Atanackov (@JAtanackov) December 20, 2024
The sun is more exciting than a big bright shiny thing. It’s more like a hydrogen bomb. Except it keeps going off, restrained only because it’s really massive and gravity keeps things under control. More or less. When something gets away, you get a solar flare, which can throw roughly 10^13 kilograms of sun stuff out, traveling at anywhere from 250 to 3,000 kilometers a second. (That’s 10 billion tons at up to about 1,800 miles per second if you insist.)
🎆Celebrate the start of 2025 with solar fireworks🎆
— ESA Science (@esascience) January 3, 2025
This video+sonification is based on UV images (☀️) and solar flare data (🔵) recorded by @ESA_SolarOrbiter since 1/1/2022. See and hear for yourself how the number and intensity of flares increases over time!👇 pic.twitter.com/5MCYZSSGAl
A solar flare isn’t like a flash bulb going off. (Remember flash bulbs? Okay, a strobe light flashing.) These flares have been very unusually long duration.
Yesterday's Very Long Duration Solar Flare pic.twitter.com/kUQMaELjMh
— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) December 31, 2024
It makes them very intense.
The full evolution of today’s mesmerising #SolarFlare, which continued for over 12 hours! This is a very long duration event, as most flares are over well within an hour of onset. Just look at those flare loops grow! Awe-some stuff. #spaceweather #astronomy pic.twitter.com/URwwZNfm5S
— Dr. Ryan French (@RyanJFrench) September 2, 2024
When the mass ejected reaches Earth, it’s largely deflected by Earth’s magnetic field, which is basically a gigantic torus (like a donut) with the hole going through the Earth aligned with the magnetic poles. So the plasma is directed down toward the poles, where it interacts with the atmosphere, exciting atoms at very high altitudes. The excited atoms radiate in various colors.
Around the South Pole, it’s called aurora australis, or southern lights...
… and around the Noth Pole, aurora borealis.
Prades here is only about 60 miles further north than Denver.
Greenland, of course, is considerably further north.
Did you know there is such a thing as black aurorae or anti-auroras? I didn’t. They are cool too.
Okay, some nebulae just to break the monotony.
Nebula are wondrous works of art, and the cosmos is their canvas.
— FarLife (@FarLife1) January 3, 2025
These exquisite cosmic creations exhibit a stunning array of colors, shapes, and patterns. The vibrant hues are the result of different types of gases emitting light at various wavelengths, producing a visual… pic.twitter.com/gkk7fvneCP
And that’s it for another week. Were it not for the Sun going nuts, I would have collected some people’s best images from 2024, but I just couldn’t resist the aurorae. So best of the year next week.
As always, your kind comments are very much appreciated. Unkind comments are less so, but any interaction is good as far as traffic goes. So knock yourselves out.
