Watch an angry giant lash out repeatedly as it tracks across the surface of the Sun
Credit: NASA/SDO/Zell
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Tuesday, November 4, 2014, 7:25 PM - When a sunspot the size of Jupiter goes crawling across the face of the Sun, there's a certain expectation that it's going to put on a show, and AR2192 - the largest active region on the sun seen in over 24 years - did not disappoint.
This incredible sunspot complex peeked around the eastern limb of the Sun on October 18 and finally ducked around the western limb on October 29. In this 11-day trip across the face of the Sun, it wowed us with its size, as it showed up in numerous photos of October 23rd's partial solar eclipse. It earned our praise as it put on spectacular displays of coronal loops. It also earned our respect as it punched out an incredible array of solar flares.
CLICK BELOW TO WATCH: This video, from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, tracks AR2192 on its journey, pausing to let us marvel at its magnificence.
These flares pop off at incredible speeds in the video. However, seeing 11 days compressed down into just over 3 minutes, it's not hard to see how these actually take significantly longer. Just one X-class solar flare (the strongest type of flare our Sun produces) can take well over an hour from beginning to end, all the while bombarding the surrounding area with high-energy x-rays.
In case they still all flash by too quickly in the video, NASA produced this poster to show off 10 of the most powerful flares that AR2192 blasted out.
Credit: NASA/SDO/H.Zell
One of the unusual things about AR2192 was that, even with all of these intense, powerful solar flares, it didn't produce any significant coronal mass ejections - the immense eruptions of solar matter that powerful flares often send streaming off into space.
"You certainly can have flares without CMEs and vice versa, but most big flares do have CMEs," solar scientist Alex Young, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement on Tuesday. "So we're learning that a big active region doesn't always equal the biggest events."
"Having so many similar flares from the same active region will be a nice case study for people who work on predicting solar flares," Dean Pesnell, the project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, the satellite that captured all of these amazing images, added in the statement. "This is important for one day improving the nation's ability to forecast space weather and protect technology and astronauts in space."
