One of our goals with SDO is to be able to predict all kinds of solar activity. It's not as easy as you think. Monica Bobra is developing ways to predict when flares will occur. The blog article talks about using machine learning methods for these predictions.
Check it out!
Here is an AIA 171 image at 1540 UTC (10:40 a.m. ET) showing a nice coronal loop in the northern hemisphere.
This farside images allow us to track magnetic features where SDO cannot see. They have been compared with the full-Sun images we make by combining SDO and STEREO images. When AR 12192 returns it will have a new number but we hope it will be just as active.
Many thanks to the HMI team for producing these images and movies. They are available at JSOC.
Update 11/6/2014 1447 UTC (9:47 am ET): The fiber optics provider has found the break, dug it up, and should be splicing the fiber links soon. I do not know how long each fiber takes to splice or how many fibers are in this bundle, so there is no estimate at this time when we will return to service.
I downloaded the active region dataset produced by David Hathaway at Marshall SFC and looked at the largest active regions since 1874. This area data comes from the photographs taken at the Royal Greenwich Observatory until 1976 and various sources after that. I checked the list against the tables in Sunspot and Geomagnetic-Storm Data by Sir H. Spencer Jones just to make sure. I also added two regions from 2014 (AR 12192, of course, and AR 11967). Areas of active regions are measured in micro-hems (millionths of a solar hemisphere, where 1 micro-hem is about 1.54 million sq km.)
The yearly Sunspot Number is drawn as a red line. This allows you compare how the maximum area of active regions changes with the number of active regions. It was surprising that the largest active regions are not in Solar Cycle 19, which has the largest amplitude in Sunspot Number, but in Solar Cycle 18. The top 5 active regions appeared between 1946 and 1951. Solar Cycle 19 started in 1954. The next set of large active regions have areas of 3000-4000 micro-hems and are spread across many sunspot cycles.
How big was the active region that was the site of the Carrington Flare? It was 2300 micro-hems, not even in the top 50! You can look it up on p. 102 of the table by Jones. The flare on 1-Sep-1859 has been estimated at X35, showing that large flares can come from medium-sized active regions.
So long for now to AR 12192 but perhaps we will see you next rotation!
This active region has caused a "Major Flare Watch" to be declared, so the two calibration maneuvers SDO had scheduled for today will be done in two weeks. Here is a summary of our projected activities for the rest of 2014.
Today the sun let loose a X1.6 flare, starting at 1721 and peaking at 1745 UTC.
Here is an illustration of a rocket flight from the surface of Earth to the center of the Sun. A few altitudes in each atmosphere are shown. The Earth altitudes are the surface, tropopause (where airliners fly), and the Kármán line (the boundary between our atmosphere and space). The Sun shows the photosphere (the visible surface of the Sun), the bottom of the convection zone, the top of the nuclear core, and the center of the Sun. I used atmospheres (atm) as the unit because 1 atm is the pressure we are most used to.
A question about the interior of the Sun was recently asked on the Little SDO Facebook page:
"No one will ever know what is at the core of the sun. How do the scientist know what’s at the core, have they been in there? Did they actually build something that can withstand the heat of the sun to go in there and look?"
Amazing as it seems, we know quite a bit about the conditions at the center of the Sun. They are measured in two independent ways, sound waves and neutrinos. We also build models of the Sun that use what we know about the physics of plasmas that must agree with those measurements.
Let’s think about the models first. Stars live in a state of precarious balance between gravity trying to pull material inward and pressure pushing the same stuff outward. At every altitude in an atmosphere the pressure needs to be sufficient to hold up the mass of material above it.
You live at the bottom of an atmosphere. The mass of the atmosphere above you produces a pressure at the surface of (believe it or not) 1 atmosphere! It is also a pressure of 1015 mbar or hPa. How does an atmosphere work? Think of the atmosphere as having layers that start at the ground and going toward space. If you move from the lowest level (at the ground) up to the next level we find that the pressure is smaller because the higher level supports less mass. As we continue moving up the pressure continues to decrease until finally the density is too low and we say we are in outer space.
How do we relate this to the Sun? Starting at the top of the Sun we find a small pressure is necessary to hold up the small mass of the atmosphere. Moving down into the Sun we find the pressure continues to increase until we reach the core. Pressure comes from temperature and density (remember the ideal gas law). That means the temperature and density also increases as we move into the Sun
Astronomers know how to use these models to estimate the pressure, temperature and density in the core of the Sun. The simplest models give a core temperature of 20 million K, a core density of 75 gr/cm3, and a central pressure of 1.2e17 dyne/cm2. That is a pressure of 120 billion atmospheres! Even at these incredible pressures the core of the Sun is hot enough that the material remains a gas. More accurate models that follow the fusion reactions that power the Sun give the pressure as 2.4e17 dyne/cm2 (230 billion atm), a temperature of 15.7 million K, and a density of 154 gr/cm3. The illustration shows some pressure values at some altitudes in the atmospheres of the Earth and Sun as if we could fly a rocket to the center of the Sun.
But scientists are skeptical of models and those numbers should also be checked by a measurement. This led to one of the great debates of physics, the core conditions deduced from Sun’s sound waves and the core deduced from the observed number of neutrinos, known as “Solar Neutrino Problem”.
When the velocity of the solar surface is analyzed we find that it is made up of millions of waves moving with measurable frequencies. These waves also move around inside the Sun. Roughly speaking the lower the frequency of the wave the deeper the wave moves into the Sun. We can also calculate the frequencies of the waves that move in the models we built earlier. Because there are so many waves, matching the model and observed frequencies gives a very good check on our model. (This is like tuning a large bell or pipe organ.) Our current model agrees very well with the observed frequencies. That means the sound waves confirm that the temperature and pressure at the center of the Sun agrees with the frequencies from the accurate model of the Sun.
Another check on this comes from the neutrinos that are emitted by the fusion reactions in the core of the Sun. Neutrinos are neutral particles that interact very poorly with other particles. They have very small masses and come in three flavors, electron, muon, and tau. Neutrinos are very difficult to detect but would tell us whether the reactions used in the model were correct. When they were first detected, the meaasured number of neutrinos did not agree with the model that worked so well for the waves. Less than half of the number predicted by the model were observed!
After much research, such as changing the model near the core to reduce the fusion reactions and the calculated number of neutrinos the model would emit, a new theory of neutrinos was tried. The Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) effect causes neutrinos to change flavor, from electron neutrino to muon or tau neutrino, as they move through matter. Could this be the reason for the “Solar Neutrino Problem”?
The first neutrino flux measurements in the Homestead Mine were of only very high energy neutrinos. Lower energy fluxes from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory showed that most of the neutrinos produced by the fusion reactions in the core of the Sun, all of which are electron neutrinos, are changed into muon and tau neutrinos by the time they reach the Earth. Once this particle physics concept was confirmed, the central temperature of the Sun from the sound waves is confirmed.
People have thought about the center of the Sun for over 100 years. The models of the Sun are based on the 1983 Nobel Prize winning work by S. Chandrasekhar and W. A. Fowler. The 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to R. Davis and M. Koshiba for the first detection of cosmic neutrinos. T. Duvall, a scientist who works with SDO data, recently won the AAS/SPD Hale Prize for his work using the sound waves to understand the inside of the Sun.
That’s how we know the conditions at the core of the Sun.
We are looking forward to eclipse season starting August 29, 2014, giving us another opportunity to see the Earth's limb against the Sun. Eclipse season ends September 21, just in time for a lunar transit on September 24 from 0650-0720 UTC (2:50-3:20 a.m. ET).A station-keeping maneuver will happen on September 3, 2014, at 2245 UTC (6:45 p.pm. ET).
This week we have the EVE cruciform maneuver on Wednesday, July 23. On Saturday, July 26 we will have a lunar transit. Here is a short movie showing how the Moon moves through the SDO field of view. The transit lasts from 1457–1542 UTC (10:57-11:42 a.m. ET).
The Sun had a spotless day on July 17! According to the SIDC there were no sunspots on the Sun that day. The average sunspot number for 2014 remains at 90, even though the daily value has been as high as 150. This was the first spotless day since 2011. Unlike the spotless days in 2009-2011, several small sunspots appeared that day. They weren't seen at the earlier time used by the official observer. Here is an HMI with the sunspot circled.
A magnetic field is one of the fields used to track forces. It gives us a recipe to describe magnetic forces around the source of the field.
Gravitational fields are used to describe the orbits of planets around the Sun. Electric fields describe how currents flow in the power grid and how radios work. A magnetic field is how we keep track of the magnetic force created by many moving particles (or electrical currents). There are two nuclear fields as well. Fields are not simple concepts. They do not follow our usual experiences. A concept like Newton’s law of motion, that force is equal to mass times acceleration, can be seen every day. But even though they are invisible, fields are as real as the forces they allow us to calculate.
Magnetic fields come from electrical currents, whether in the Sun or a magnet. The strength of magnetic forces can be greater than the force of gravity (that’s why magnets work) but it is weaker than the electric forces between charges. It also works when the source of the magnetic field is electrically neutral!
What is a magnetic field? A magnetic field is the region of space near a body where magnetic forces due to the body can be detected. It’s the reaction of the particles that counts, not the region.
Edited 08/05/2014 to fix the bar magnet picture.
@NASA_SDO was one of the first Twitter feeds providing updates about a NASA mission. It was where the first NASA TweetUp for launch was posted. The First Light press conference was attended by several Twitter correspondents, who sent out their impressions on this feed. @NASA_SDO was where Comet Lovejoy reappeared as the Phoenix comet and where Comet ISON never even showed up. I hope the 17K followers keep up with the SDO updates on @NASASunEarth and @TheSunToday.
Many thanks to @AleyaJean for bringing Twitter to SDO! #SadToSeeItEnd
Makes you want to get up early in the morning just to see what's happening on the Sun!
The Hale Prize is awarded annually by the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society for outstanding contributions over an extended period of time to the field of solar astronomy. The prize is named in memory of George Ellery Hale, who discovered the magnetic field in sunspots and also developed the observing techniques that made local helioseismology possible.
The citation for Dr. Duvall reads:
Hale Prize for 2014
The Hale Prize has been awarded to Thomas Duvall, Jr., for his invention and application of innovative helioseismic methods and the resulting ground-breaking discoveries within the solar interior, including internal sound-speed and rotation profiles, meridional circulation, wave perturbations in sunspots, and large scale convection properties.
Congratulations Tom for a well-deserved award!
The discovery of late-phase flares depended on the linking of MEGS-A spectra and AIA images. The SAM images were made by a pinhole camera, but had a remarkable accuracy in determining the location of flares.
MEGS-B, MEGS-P, and ESP are working as designed.
This letter from Tom Woods, the EVE PI, was sent out yesterday.
Hi EVE team,
We're sad to report that EVE MEGS-A / SAM data stream has ended on Monday May 26, 2014 due to a power anomaly for MEGS-A CCD electronics. With the SAM images being from MEGS-A CCD, both SAM solar X-ray images and MEGS-A spectra (6-37 nm) are not available now. The MEGS-A and SAM data from May 1, 2010 to May 26, 2014 will remain available from the EVE web site ( http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/eve/ ).
All the other EVE instruments are working well, ESP, MEGS-B, and MEGS-P. We¹ll be working with the EVE science team to optimize the EVE observations with those instruments.
The Hangout URL is: https://plus.google.com/events/c99gnf2e4l9vb4n6logpsemkhlo, staring at 2:30 pm ET and going aboit an hour.
CNN featured a picture of the March 29 flare in Pictures of the Week!
One of the cool things about knowing astronomers is the clever things they do with cameras. Here is one example. William Livingston, a solar astronomer living in Tucson, AZ, has taken pictures of the geostationary satellite ring since about 2001. These satellites tend to be big, and stay in one place over the Earth. By taking a long exposure (here about 9 hours), the satellites are almost points of light while the stars are long trails. (A nine hour star trail would cover 135 degrees of the sky.) Here is an example from March 2014. You can see 40 satellites in the center of the picture, all but one labeled with their name. SDO orbits the Sun every 24 hours, but at an angle to where these satellites orbit. Because it does not hover over the same place on Earth, SDO moves up and down through the geostationary satellites every day. So SDO isn't a point of light, it is another trail moving across the star trails. To help you find it, SDO is labeled on the plot. It is the very faint trail moving downward from between DirecTV 11 and DirecTV 8 to the l in Solar.
Dr. Livingston has been taking these pictures since 2001. I found a link about some of his first pictures. Another link describes the settings for digital cameras if you want to try to take pictures yourself. You'll need a dark sky and a steady mount!
Thanks to Bill for sending me these pictures.
This data is used to study how the instruments change while they are on orbit. The most important science that comes out is whether the Sun is round or bulges a little bit at the waist. So far, it appears that the Sun bulges less than we expect and that bulge does not change very much as sunspots come and go. The only way to check is to redo the measurements at different times in the solar cycle. This set of points will be made at the maximum of Solar Cycle 24.
Today at 1840 UTC (2:40 pm ET) SDO will execute a momentum management maneuver. For about 45 minutes from 1815 to 1900 UTC SDO data may be unavailable.
January's 31 days are a little longer than one solar rotation of 27.27 days. That means you see a part of the Sun that is just off limb at the beginning of the month a second time as that part of the Sun rotates back into view. Active region 11944 is present throughout the month in the southern hemisphere and reappears as AR 11967 at the end of the movie. AR 11946 grows in the northern hemisphere and will reappear as AR 11968. AR 11944 will also return as AR 11990 in late February. On February 25 it will be the location of an X-4.9 flare as it rotates back into view.
Long-lived active regions are a sign that solar maximum is here and starting to fade.
Check it out!
Today at 2035 UTC (5:35 pm ET) SDO will execute a stationkeeping maneuver. For about 45 minutes from 2015 to 2100 UTC SDO data will be unavailable.
Here is an image from our first eclipse. It is always nice to see the ragged edge of the Earth's atmosphere as the bright spots on the Sun shine through while the dimmer regions disappear. Here we can see AR 11988 near the edge of the Earth, with a coronal hole just to the right. Active regions 11981-11984 are further to the right and are hardly affected by the Earth, although they soon disappear behind the Earth.
When SDO can't see the Sun we don't get data. Eclipses are one of our largest data holes. But the orbit gives us 24/7 access to the data flow. So far we have received 98% of the data, so the eclipses aren't a problem but they are pretty!
The flare lasted from 0039 UTC until 0103 UTC. The area of impact would be the sunlit side of Earth, with the greatest effects at the sub-solar point. Any coronal mass ejection from this location is unlikely to hit the Earth but might be measured by the STEREO spacecraft.
When I think about solar maximum it isn’t just sunspot number. I think about how bright the Sun has gotten in the wavelengths of light that cause space weather. Satellite drag and radio outages are two space weather effects that are caused by light at extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths, roughly 10-125 nm. This light is so completely absorbed by the atmosphere that it never reaches the surface of the Earth. In space we must be to see the EUV.
Here is a squiggly line chart of the Sun's EUV brightness in six wavelengths, averaged over each day. The data come from EVE on SDO. The squiggles start in May 2010 and continue until February 2014. I plotted the logarithm of the brightness to make all of the lines visible. As the Sun emits more light at one wavelength the squiggle goes higher on the chart. Each line has a different color and they are labeled to the right with the element and wavelength of the line. The other number is we will explain in a minute. He II 304 is the brightest, followed by C III 977 and H I 1026. The three iron wavelengths are next.
You can make similar plots of each wavelength with the EVE data browser on the SDO website.
Since SDO was launched each of these wavelengths has gotten brighter in its own way. The peak He II 304 irradiance was in February 2014 and a horizontal line is drawn at that value. The smallest He II 304 value was in June 2010 and another horizontal line is drawn at that value. The ratio of the brightest to the dimmest is 2.1. The same max and min lines are drawn for the H I 1026 irradiance, with a ratio of 1.7. The Fe XVI 335 wavelength is 12 times brighter, the biggest ratio of these wavelengths. We now see that the other number in the label is the ratio of the brightest to the dimmest the Sun has been in the EVE data.
The biggest monthly sunspot number so far in Solar Cycle 24 is 97 in November 2011. I drew a vertical line at that date. The sunspot number was 91 for January 2014, a little less than November 2011. The iron wavelengths are all about the same brightness now as they were then, but He II 304 is distinctly brighter now. H I 1026 is as bright now as it was in November 2011. These differences in brightness during solar maximum show how complicated the sunspot cycle is.
The different wavelengths look the same at other times. A “wave” appears during the second half of 2012 in all six wavelengths. Each wave is a turn of the Sun. During this time the Sun was brighter and dimmer in a pattern that turned with the Sun. We see the rotations most of the time but 2012 is a great episode of “As the Sun Turns.”
These data show why it so difficult to say when solar maximum happened. Each wavelength has a different timing of it’s peak brightness. Even as we use sunspot number to say when solar maximum was, we should keep in mind that solar maximum is not a point in time but extends over several years.
Thanks for looking at SDO data and making us a great mission. Here's an AIA 193 image that seems to have the Sun smiling at us as we start our fifth year.
SDO is GO!
Here is an image from 2014-01-30 14:29:12 in the AIA 171 passband. If you watch the movie you will see the Sun move a little bit during the transit. This transit covers a lot of the solar disk and blocks the sunlight from SDO. The fine guidance systems on AIA and HMI can't work because they need to see the whole Sun to keep the images centered from exposure to exposure. Once the transit is over the fine guidance systems started back up, giving us steady images of Sun.
And, as the Moon left SDO's field of view, an M8 flare erupted in AR 11967.
The Earth orbits the Sun along an ellipse. That means sometimes we’re farther from the Sun and sometimes closer. The average distance of the Earth from the Sun is about 150 million km (about 93 million miles, one Astronomical Unit or AU). Perihelion is the starting time for that orbit. The distance of perihelion is also important. The perihelion distance of the Earth is about 1.67% closer than the average distance.
When the Earth is closer to the Sun it receives more sunlight and when it is further away it receives less sunlight. That means the timing and distance of perihelion can affect our climate. That doesn’t mean that being closer to the Sun automatically means warmer weather.
Our seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth’s rotation axis compared to our orbit around the Sun. In January the northern hemisphere of the Earth is tilted away from the Sun and the northern latitudes have winter. At the same time those living in southern latitudes experience summer. Because the tilt determines the seasons we mark our seasons by the solstices and equinoxes.
But the changing distance does affect our climate. It appears to make southern winters a little less frigid and northern summers a little milder. In the past the difference was more dramatic.
The timing of perihelion in the year changes slowly. Right now perihelion happens in northern winter, while 11,000 years ago it happened in northern summer. That changed the severity of the seasons.
If we wait even longer (several hundred thousand years) the shape of the Earth’s orbit also changes, with the eccentricity changing from nearly 0 (almost circular) to the current value of 0.0167 to 0.06. A circular orbit means the distance to the Sun does not change, while a more elliptical orbit means the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth changes even more during the year. Right now the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth at perihelion is about 6.5% greater than what hits the Earth at the furthest distance. At an eccentricity of 0.06 that would increase to 27%.
These are just two of the Milankovitch cycles that were developed to explain glaciations.
SDO instruments were built to allow for the changing distance and apparent size of the Sun during a year. But it’s nice to know that those changes do other things as well.
Have a Happy Perihelion Day!
