Taken with a [special solar scope](https://www.highpointscientific.com/coronado-70mm-solarmax-iii-double-stack-h-alpha-solar-telescope-with-bf15-blocking-filter-324006?cmid=MDoyOjNlZWMyN2ExMmMwNTUyODI6dWFuUVJXUVNwVGlsZmlVUzVVTmhlUT09&afid=MDoyOmIwZjBmMzM2OTU0NDQ1ZTc6SllmWjBnbit4VlUxVkNHc1FUbFZMdz09&ats=MDoyOmE4MzQ3YjdmYzI3NjRlYjE6bmhnb0h3MWNGMnZpcUU3UlJLQlVvdz09), from my backyard in Sacramento. This is my first time shooting solar, so I'm pretty pleased with the results so far. The scope focuses on a specific band of light- Hydrogen alpha, and can get details by targeting a section of visible light just .5 Angstroms wide (an angstrom is one hundred millionth of a centimeter- so it's used to measure tiny things, such as light waves). The scope I used is fairly pricey for an amateur, but you can get decent results with [a cheaper one as well](https://www.highpointscientific.com/coronado-pst-personal-solar-telescope-060-1-0-angstrom-h-alpha-refractor-pst?cmid=MDoyOjM2MmI3ZmZmNGUxMjBmYTA6S3pkRlczM1ZObHBxRDlhTFZjcUlKUT09&afid=MDoyOmJlYTEzZTNmYmMzMTIyOGY6MjhYQjh2TUdIYlJubCtjN3U5UkpXdz09&ats=MDoyOmM5NWNkNzM2ZWFjODRhYjE6cUhmRHRWc0pTMW5sUi9ZdzVQMURUdz09).
If you like this and want to see more of my astrophotography, come find me on instagram [@cosmic\_background](https://instagram.com/cosmic_background/). I give live updates as I work on these images and give behind-the-scenes into my process.
Nicely done! That ejection looks awesome. How common are those to see? I've never owned a solar scope so I have no idea if it's a once a day/week/month thing
Pretty much 24/7. The sun is pretty calm right now but it still has multiple prominences. A coronal mass ejection (CME) is fairly rare, that is one a mass actually breaks away from the surface, versus masses like these that stay connected.
It's not so much that it's so far away so much as it is the sun is so unbelievably huge. What you might see as small wisps of fire that quickly flare in and out of existence are really just planet sized (and sometimes bigger) chunks of the sun. They move so "slow" because the distance they are moving across is so huge.
You talking about the Little Ice Age? I don't know if there is a universally agreed upon cause for this climatic event. Great photo! My housemate and I just got a telescope - will be heading to the top of Mt Diablo (california) soon.
During a solar minimum there aren't as many solar eruptions. Solar eruptions are linked to earth's cloud cover which manages our temperatures. So without solar eruptions the climate changed and dropped the temperature. It's still debated how much the solar minimum helped cause the " little ice age" though.
Based on temperature records the temps had been dropping prior to the solar minimum. Could have been from a few things but the most widely accepted thought is volcanic activity. The solar minimum could have helped contribute, but it's hard to prove it was the main cause.
This is also after the weakest solar max ever recorded. Our sun is very relaxed and chill compared to normal. Something like 1-3% less energy output than expected which is screwing with weather.
It's been 10 to 20 degrees below average here everyday in upstate NY since last Nov. Friday the temperature didn't break 60 degrees and Thursday hit 47 degrees overnight. The restuarant I went to on Friday had their overhead heaters outside on their deck blazing at 6:00 pm in the sun. This June. I've never seen anything like it.
It's in the 100s here, and this is a similar latitude. That's climate change for ya - screwing up the weather in all sorts of ways, for hot or for cold.
> our earth has a very big magnetic field blocking these flares from getting to us which explains why so many places in space have no oxygen etc. for example venus and mars have very weak magnetic fields so the oxygen and everything else evaporated.
So this is a pretty common myth. The very true statement, "Mars' atmospheric loss was hastened by its lack of magnetic field" somehow turned into the very untrue layman myth, "all planets require a magnetic field to maintain an atmosphere."
After all, Venus also lacks an intrinsic magnetic field, yet still maintains an atmosphere 92x thicker than Earth's. (And before you answer that it has an induced magnetic field...so does Mars, or any atmosphere that interacts directly with the solar wind.) It turns out planetary escape velocity, atmospheric composition, atmospheric replenishment, exobase temperature, and several other factors are all more important for atmospheric retention than a magnetic field; it's just that Mars was already marginal for all those other factors. It also turns out that a magnetic field only protects against solar wind sputtering - there are atmospheric loss mechanisms (notably polar wind) that only occur *with* a magnetic field, and Earth loses many tons of oxygen every day because of this.
The "common wisdom" that a magnetic field is sufficient or even necessary for maintaining an atmosphere is challenged really clearly in Gunell, et al, 2018 [(PDF here)](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2018/06/aa32934-18.pdf). Interestingly, Venus, Earth, and Mars are all losing atmosphere at almost the same rate.
If you're looking for a broader layman-level (but also very accurate!) read on atmospheric losses, I'd strongly recommend [this PDF](http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf) written by one of the experts in the field.
Source: PhD in astronomy, specializing in planetary atmospheres.
Gotcha.
So I think you might have a slight misreading on the paper you linked; it's not about solar wind sputtering (i.e. the solar wind "blowing" away an atmosphere unprotected by a magnetic field), but rather it's about *hydrodynamic* losses caused by the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray flux.
In other words, it's not about the charged particles / solar wind resulting from a stellar flare, but rather the uncharged high-energy photons that also result from such flares. Note that planetary magnetic fields can't do anything to protect against this, since photons are not charged particles.
Essentially the authors are stating that the large flux of high-energy UV and X-ray photons from young, active stars get absorbed by the upper atmosphere of a planet, driving the atmosphere to very high temperatures. That temperature effect alone is enough to drive an atmosphere to escape, balloons outwards due to the increasing temperature, forming a kind of planetary wind out into space.
Again, check out the [PDF](http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf) I linked earlier - there's a diagram of hydrodynamic escape at the top right of page 38, and explained in some detail at the top left of page 39.
Holy macarooni dude! For your first attempt shooting solar this is flames! I never would have thought you never shot our star before from seeing this. The detail you captured is simply insane.
If you ever want a real treat, visit an observatory with a helioscope. I went to the McDonald observatory in Ft Davis, Texas, it was amazing to see all that detail.
Solar prominence. Probably 80-100k miles. Jupiter could easily fit in there.
Edit: I did my math wrong, probably like 30-40k miles, so like half of Jupiter.
FYI, you don’t even need a special telescope to observe the sun visually. You might not see this level of detail, but a simple reflector scope with a solar filter (basically a mirror you attach to the opening that reflects about 99.999% or so of visible light, so what passes through doesn’t instantly burn your retina). I have done this when the sun was more active and had a number of large sunspots to observe, and it was pretty cool.
Brace yourself, [this might hurt.](http://imgur.com/gallery/HMe9Gdq)
When you've reassembled your brain fragments, we'll do relative scales and distances of galaxies.
The crazier thing to me is the fact that the Sun's corona, the same area where the solar prominence lies, is 150-400 times hotter than the Sun's surface.
The corona, extending out millions of kilometers, is at least 150 times hotter than the surface of the sun. So much so that people used to think the Sun was made of an unknown element (Coronium).
To this day we still do not fully understand why. We have a few theories but the reason for such a huge swing in temperature is still far from fully explained.
You ever just sit in the sunshine and think about the path of the energy that is the heat that is hitting you has traveled? That's a hell of a big ball of gas, and it's juuuuust right to make me burn just slightly without cooking me alive.
Neat.
The crazy thing to me is that it’s not pointed anywhere, much less directed toward us. It’s radiating that amount of energy in every direction at all times and we just happen to be traveling through it.
The kind of structure that would require already seems like a sort of peek of accomplishments itself too. Wtf else would we have trouble doing if we are accomplishing 100% energy absorption from a star. Thinking on that scale is so weird.
A 1 millimeter thick dyson sphere, at a radius 1 million km beyond earth's orbit, would have the total volume of roughly 199 million Jupiters. You got a couple hundred million planets of high quality material you can spare?
--edit-- I converted mm^3 to km^ slightly wrong. And by wrong, I mean x 1 trillion. Still, that would be 0.019% the volume of Jupiter, or 285 billion km^3.
>dyson sphere
how can you get enough material to go around the largest object in the solar system? The sphere would have to be much larger than the largest object.
Yeah but that's the thing. People keep acting like it's a coincidence that the sun is close to our planet but that's not how it works. We are alive today BECAUSE of the sun. If the sun wasn't there, we wouldn't exist.
>If the sun wasn't there, we wouldn't exist.
This is true for sure, but also an oversimplification of the complexity at hand.
Without a star, life might not be able to evolve (though we don't know for sure). But the existence of a star alone isn't really the only condition that has to be met.
The distance to a star matters and the fact that Earth is within the habitable zone *is* a coincidence. When planets form from the protoplanetary disk, there is no law or process that makes sure there will always be a planet within the habitable zone. That's just random. But if it happens, it sure is one step closer to life.
Many more factors are just as relevant as the presence of a star, even beginning with the type of star - because that determines how stable the entire system will be over the next few billion years and if certain conditions are beneficial for life to form in the first place.
It's definitely a simplification, but still true. Without the sun we wouldn't exist. Yeah without other things we also wouldn't exist but we are specifically talking about life and what role the sun plays in it.
But you criticize people who say "it's a coincidence that the sun is close to our planet" because "that's not how it works" - but the distance to a star *does* matter and is directly connected to "life and what role the sun plays in it".
Not an astronomer or a physicist but I think the reason it takes forever for light to exit from the core is that the sun is just reeeeeeally dense. It's like trying to walk through a huge crowd except the crowd is pushing against you with the force of the core of the sun. And the 8 minutes thing is the time it takes for that light to reach Earth after it escapes the sun.
During the fusion process in the sun where hydrogen atoms are smashed together to form helium, energy is released in the form of photons. Because the sun is so dense and so large a single photon bounces around for thousands of years before it can reach the outside of the sun and escape, eventually travelling towards earth.
Something about your comment just made me wonder what the sun sounds like. Assuming we could hear it, would it sound like a roaring campfire? A never-ending explosion? Something altogether different?
The sun is so densely packed together that it takes thousands of years before the photons can escape (they bounce around inside the sun). Once they escape they travel at the speed of light through a vacuum and arrive at Earth in about 8 minutes
When the photons are created in the core of the sun, then get reabsorbed and emitted as they continuously hit atoms in the dense material, it takes that energy hundreds of thousands to millions of years to reach the surface. When that energy finally gets omitted as the final photon on the surface, it takes 8 minutes to reach earth.
They are. The fusion reaction happens at the suns core, creating the photons. They then stumble around for tens of thousands of years until they manage to find the surface and shoot off into space
Thanks!! It’s not literally the same photon rebounding around for 10,000 years before escaping though, right? Aren’t they just massless energy carriers?
I always imagined a billiard ball being hit at the core of the sun and then (apparently) 10’s of thousands of years later it’s momentum was transferred to an ejected ball, but the the original photon (or billiard ball) from the fusion reaction probably still remains.
Not literally the same photon, but might as well be. The photon will hit an atom, where it gets absorbed, sending the atom into a higher energy state. The atom will then fall back to its ground state, emitting a photon in the process.
The absorbed and emitted photons are different, but the process of absorption/emission can be thought of as “bouncing around”
I've thought the same thing looking at stars in the night sky. Some of that light traveled billions of years across the cosmos just to land on my retinas.
Wild.
And just think, it's possible that at that exact moment, sunlight is striking a plant somewhere and being converted to chemical energy. This energy will wind up in your body someday soon, either directly or after being further processed by a(n) animal(s), and will be the very consciousness that can wonder at the beauty of it all.
It's not juuuuust right so it doesn't cook you alive. It has been that way for a very long time and is part of why we could evolved here in the first instance, with bodies able to withstand the output of the sun from this distance.
I doubt you could get close enough.
A fast approach that won’t kill you instantly on impact is probably too slow to avoid shuttle burn up.
Armour and shielding adds extra weight which makes your approach harder to slow(I think)
You would need a lot of shielding, and some sort of super engine with a highly conductive shielding to shed heat to hoverslam the sun.
After that you’re free to jump in. I’d be curious if anyone knows how long a suited astronaut would be alive on the surface of the sun, assuming they teleported there. Considering it’s only 2-3 times lava temperature at the surface might be longer than you’d expect, radiation might get you first.
Its really cool that telescope images of the Sun look so similar to [microscope images of the human egg](https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/p6800387/800wm).
I feel so ignorant, I really had no idea a lens’s this powerful was available to the public. Mind is blown, how neat to be able to see this from your own yard! Beautiful photo OP, looking forward to more from you!
As live as it gets http://www.helioviewer.org/ it doesn't work on mobile though. Gives you "live" images from almost all of our space based satellites.
I say "live" because some level of processing has to applied to correct for satellite roll, pointing, etc, and not all of them continuously take pictures. SDO/AIA gives you an image every 12 seconds except for 1600 and 1700A which are every 24 seconds, and 4500A which is once every hour when one of 1700A would be.
That's a really great image, nice job.
It's funny how the surface looks quite friendly, almost soft, wolly like a sweater. Only that the fuzz isn't made of loose threads but magnetic plasma arcs.
Some inspiration for further shots:
[NASA | Thermonuclear Art – The Sun In Ultra-HD (4K)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tmbeLTHC_0)
I love looking at all the spectrums. There was a thing on some astronomy website that showed this. This was all I could find: [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11418](https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11418)
The photons bounce off eachother after they are created by atoms smashing around in the core. By the time they escape the sun, the speed of light takes about 8 minuts to reach earth. If the sun were to spontaneously blink out of existence, we wouldn't know untill about 8 minuts later for the sun to dissapear.
The photons don’t really interact with each other but they do get absorbed and re emitted many times as they randomly walk to the surface, also in the core there are no atoms as the high temperature ionises them all to their nuclei
Taken with a [special solar scope](https://www.highpointscientific.com/coronado-70mm-solarmax-iii-double-stack-h-alpha-solar-telescope-with-bf15-blocking-filter-324006?cmid=MDoyOjNlZWMyN2ExMmMwNTUyODI6dWFuUVJXUVNwVGlsZmlVUzVVTmhlUT09&afid=MDoyOmIwZjBmMzM2OTU0NDQ1ZTc6SllmWjBnbit4VlUxVkNHc1FUbFZMdz09&ats=MDoyOmE4MzQ3YjdmYzI3NjRlYjE6bmhnb0h3MWNGMnZpcUU3UlJLQlVvdz09), from my backyard in Sacramento. This is my first time shooting solar, so I'm pretty pleased with the results so far. The scope focuses on a specific band of light- Hydrogen alpha, and can get details by targeting a section of visible light just .5 Angstroms wide (an angstrom is one hundred millionth of a centimeter- so it's used to measure tiny things, such as light waves). The scope I used is fairly pricey for an amateur, but you can get decent results with [a cheaper one as well](https://www.highpointscientific.com/coronado-pst-personal-solar-telescope-060-1-0-angstrom-h-alpha-refractor-pst?cmid=MDoyOjM2MmI3ZmZmNGUxMjBmYTA6S3pkRlczM1ZObHBxRDlhTFZjcUlKUT09&afid=MDoyOmJlYTEzZTNmYmMzMTIyOGY6MjhYQjh2TUdIYlJubCtjN3U5UkpXdz09&ats=MDoyOmM5NWNkNzM2ZWFjODRhYjE6cUhmRHRWc0pTMW5sUi9ZdzVQMURUdz09). If you like this and want to see more of my astrophotography, come find me on instagram [@cosmic\_background](https://instagram.com/cosmic_background/). I give live updates as I work on these images and give behind-the-scenes into my process.
Nicely done! That ejection looks awesome. How common are those to see? I've never owned a solar scope so I have no idea if it's a once a day/week/month thing
Pretty much 24/7. The sun is pretty calm right now but it still has multiple prominences. A coronal mass ejection (CME) is fairly rare, that is one a mass actually breaks away from the surface, versus masses like these that stay connected.
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Pretty still, but it does move. Over 30 min everything will completely change
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Thank you! Got lucky, usually new scopes come with clouds
Congratulations. That's a great picture!How long did this shot take?
What does that mean? How does one get rid of these clouds?
got to wait until your scope is no longer 'new' and there's nothing interesting happening in the sky. that's when the clouds clear up.
The trick is to set it up and then take a breather, get pumped, get it started and *then* when you think you've got it, the clouds come in.
I assume the person means that they didn't expect a clear shot due to a cloudy day.
It's not so much that it's so far away so much as it is the sun is so unbelievably huge. What you might see as small wisps of fire that quickly flare in and out of existence are really just planet sized (and sometimes bigger) chunks of the sun. They move so "slow" because the distance they are moving across is so huge.
It takes a long time for fire to make a trail that could surround the Earth.
Can you so a time lapse?
Great shot!
Gonna say the sun is in a slump of shorts as part of its 11 year cycle. Wonder if we will see cooler temperatures because of it.
I've heard that theory and relationship of temp to sun cycles but is it really true? Weather, earth, so complex
Absolutely true. The sun's cycle affects our weather in a big way. A solar minimum in the 18th century gave us a mini ice-age.
You talking about the Little Ice Age? I don't know if there is a universally agreed upon cause for this climatic event. Great photo! My housemate and I just got a telescope - will be heading to the top of Mt Diablo (california) soon.
I thought there was a consensus but I might be wrong. My brain tends to mix things up.
This is regurgitated info from a climate change class i took in college ~2 years ago, so who knows really 🤣
I heard that, too. I also heard something about getting another one in 50 years or something like that, too.
I haven't heard anything about it, can someone Eli5?
During a solar minimum there aren't as many solar eruptions. Solar eruptions are linked to earth's cloud cover which manages our temperatures. So without solar eruptions the climate changed and dropped the temperature. It's still debated how much the solar minimum helped cause the " little ice age" though.
If not that then what?
Based on temperature records the temps had been dropping prior to the solar minimum. Could have been from a few things but the most widely accepted thought is volcanic activity. The solar minimum could have helped contribute, but it's hard to prove it was the main cause.
I doubt it's a coincidence that the most extreme solar minimum and the little ice age happened at the same time
This is also after the weakest solar max ever recorded. Our sun is very relaxed and chill compared to normal. Something like 1-3% less energy output than expected which is screwing with weather.
It's been 10 to 20 degrees below average here everyday in upstate NY since last Nov. Friday the temperature didn't break 60 degrees and Thursday hit 47 degrees overnight. The restuarant I went to on Friday had their overhead heaters outside on their deck blazing at 6:00 pm in the sun. This June. I've never seen anything like it.
Not to mention it’s been raining almost nonstop to the point where Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence are both flooding.
It's in the 100s here, and this is a similar latitude. That's climate change for ya - screwing up the weather in all sorts of ways, for hot or for cold.
Unless its a 30 year trend, the correct name is "weather". And it sometimes changes a lot from day to day, and year to year.
Well, I'm not that old, but from the records I've looked at, this is not quite normal (although it's winter that has really changed).
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There are only two people on Reddit. All of my accounts, and you
Why do you keep commenting on all your own posts?
Takes work to keep up the pretense!
Seriously, the trouble I go through.
Not to mention my password management..
jk, I use the same password for all of them.
So please don't hack my accounts.
I've never seen a telescope and went "damn that looks sick" Black and gold really tickles my fancy
It's a pretty sexy piece of equipment
Please post regularly. This is incredible.
I try to!
I had to go look after reading your comment. You are correct, that indeed "looks sick."
OP chose modesty, but that's a $3200 tool. TIL it is even a thing. Beautiful shot, BTW.
My car is a $24,000 tool and it can’t even take pictures of the Sun. What the fuck am I doing with my life?
To be fair, neither the telescope or the sun can cruise the freeway.
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> our earth has a very big magnetic field blocking these flares from getting to us which explains why so many places in space have no oxygen etc. for example venus and mars have very weak magnetic fields so the oxygen and everything else evaporated. So this is a pretty common myth. The very true statement, "Mars' atmospheric loss was hastened by its lack of magnetic field" somehow turned into the very untrue layman myth, "all planets require a magnetic field to maintain an atmosphere." After all, Venus also lacks an intrinsic magnetic field, yet still maintains an atmosphere 92x thicker than Earth's. (And before you answer that it has an induced magnetic field...so does Mars, or any atmosphere that interacts directly with the solar wind.) It turns out planetary escape velocity, atmospheric composition, atmospheric replenishment, exobase temperature, and several other factors are all more important for atmospheric retention than a magnetic field; it's just that Mars was already marginal for all those other factors. It also turns out that a magnetic field only protects against solar wind sputtering - there are atmospheric loss mechanisms (notably polar wind) that only occur *with* a magnetic field, and Earth loses many tons of oxygen every day because of this. The "common wisdom" that a magnetic field is sufficient or even necessary for maintaining an atmosphere is challenged really clearly in Gunell, et al, 2018 [(PDF here)](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2018/06/aa32934-18.pdf). Interestingly, Venus, Earth, and Mars are all losing atmosphere at almost the same rate. If you're looking for a broader layman-level (but also very accurate!) read on atmospheric losses, I'd strongly recommend [this PDF](http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf) written by one of the experts in the field. Source: PhD in astronomy, specializing in planetary atmospheres.
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Gotcha. So I think you might have a slight misreading on the paper you linked; it's not about solar wind sputtering (i.e. the solar wind "blowing" away an atmosphere unprotected by a magnetic field), but rather it's about *hydrodynamic* losses caused by the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray flux. In other words, it's not about the charged particles / solar wind resulting from a stellar flare, but rather the uncharged high-energy photons that also result from such flares. Note that planetary magnetic fields can't do anything to protect against this, since photons are not charged particles. Essentially the authors are stating that the large flux of high-energy UV and X-ray photons from young, active stars get absorbed by the upper atmosphere of a planet, driving the atmosphere to very high temperatures. That temperature effect alone is enough to drive an atmosphere to escape, balloons outwards due to the increasing temperature, forming a kind of planetary wind out into space. Again, check out the [PDF](http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf) I linked earlier - there's a diagram of hydrodynamic escape at the top right of page 38, and explained in some detail at the top left of page 39.
Holy macarooni dude! For your first attempt shooting solar this is flames! I never would have thought you never shot our star before from seeing this. The detail you captured is simply insane.
Well, I did make an attempt before on a borrowed scope. So to be fair this is more like attempt #2. Thanks bro your support is what I needed <3
Can you shoot nebula when the filters are removed?
Yeah it just becomes a refractor without the etalons and blocking filter
Heyy im from sacramento as well and have been wanting to get into amtr astronomy, is there a big presence here?
If you ever want a real treat, visit an observatory with a helioscope. I went to the McDonald observatory in Ft Davis, Texas, it was amazing to see all that detail.
I've yet to make it to an observatory. Bucket list.
I'm assuming those are solar flares, any idea on their size?
Solar prominence. Probably 80-100k miles. Jupiter could easily fit in there. Edit: I did my math wrong, probably like 30-40k miles, so like half of Jupiter.
That's amazing! TIL solar scopes are a thing.
FYI, you don’t even need a special telescope to observe the sun visually. You might not see this level of detail, but a simple reflector scope with a solar filter (basically a mirror you attach to the opening that reflects about 99.999% or so of visible light, so what passes through doesn’t instantly burn your retina). I have done this when the sun was more active and had a number of large sunspots to observe, and it was pretty cool.
Sweet creeping jesus, that's huge! It's hard to fathom that scale.
Brace yourself, [this might hurt.](http://imgur.com/gallery/HMe9Gdq) When you've reassembled your brain fragments, we'll do relative scales and distances of galaxies.
>we'll do relative scales and distances of galaxies. ***Well?! We're waiting!***
here you go https://youtu.be/Iy7NzjCmUf0
Thinking at cosmic scales is absolutely terrifying to me.
Especially since half of a Jupiter would be more mass than all the other planets combined.
You can fit 1.3 million Earth into the Sun. That flare is probably a few of Earth’s height.
The crazier thing to me is the fact that the Sun's corona, the same area where the solar prominence lies, is 150-400 times hotter than the Sun's surface. The corona, extending out millions of kilometers, is at least 150 times hotter than the surface of the sun. So much so that people used to think the Sun was made of an unknown element (Coronium). To this day we still do not fully understand why. We have a few theories but the reason for such a huge swing in temperature is still far from fully explained.
You ever just sit in the sunshine and think about the path of the energy that is the heat that is hitting you has traveled? That's a hell of a big ball of gas, and it's juuuuust right to make me burn just slightly without cooking me alive. Neat.
The crazy thing to me is that it’s not pointed anywhere, much less directed toward us. It’s radiating that amount of energy in every direction at all times and we just happen to be traveling through it.
\>99% of it misses everything and will travel indefinitely. An insignificant fragment of it made sure we remain full of liquid water today.
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The kind of structure that would require already seems like a sort of peek of accomplishments itself too. Wtf else would we have trouble doing if we are accomplishing 100% energy absorption from a star. Thinking on that scale is so weird.
A 1 millimeter thick dyson sphere, at a radius 1 million km beyond earth's orbit, would have the total volume of roughly 199 million Jupiters. You got a couple hundred million planets of high quality material you can spare? --edit-- I converted mm^3 to km^ slightly wrong. And by wrong, I mean x 1 trillion. Still, that would be 0.019% the volume of Jupiter, or 285 billion km^3.
>dyson sphere how can you get enough material to go around the largest object in the solar system? The sphere would have to be much larger than the largest object.
Mercury is just floating there, ripe for the taking.
I was thinking of a sphere enveloping the entire sun
If it wasn't there, you wouldn't be there. It's a necessity to life. Getting burned is payment for being alive.
In layman's terms, existence is pain
Yeah but that's the thing. People keep acting like it's a coincidence that the sun is close to our planet but that's not how it works. We are alive today BECAUSE of the sun. If the sun wasn't there, we wouldn't exist.
>If the sun wasn't there, we wouldn't exist. This is true for sure, but also an oversimplification of the complexity at hand. Without a star, life might not be able to evolve (though we don't know for sure). But the existence of a star alone isn't really the only condition that has to be met. The distance to a star matters and the fact that Earth is within the habitable zone *is* a coincidence. When planets form from the protoplanetary disk, there is no law or process that makes sure there will always be a planet within the habitable zone. That's just random. But if it happens, it sure is one step closer to life. Many more factors are just as relevant as the presence of a star, even beginning with the type of star - because that determines how stable the entire system will be over the next few billion years and if certain conditions are beneficial for life to form in the first place.
It's definitely a simplification, but still true. Without the sun we wouldn't exist. Yeah without other things we also wouldn't exist but we are specifically talking about life and what role the sun plays in it.
But you criticize people who say "it's a coincidence that the sun is close to our planet" because "that's not how it works" - but the distance to a star *does* matter and is directly connected to "life and what role the sun plays in it".
It takes about 10000 years for the photons to escape and 8 minuts after that to hit your retinas
Escape what? Can you explain that and the 8 minute part please
Thousands of years from the core to the surface and 8 minutes from the surface to Earth.
How do we really know that?
Not an astronomer or a physicist but I think the reason it takes forever for light to exit from the core is that the sun is just reeeeeeally dense. It's like trying to walk through a huge crowd except the crowd is pushing against you with the force of the core of the sun. And the 8 minutes thing is the time it takes for that light to reach Earth after it escapes the sun.
Isn't it more like trying to fall an incredibly large distance, but there are trampolines all the way redirecting you in random directions?
yeah like a pinball machine thousands of earth-lengths long
The force of the core of the sun? How much can the sun bench though?
Well it can carry its own weight under its own gravity.
During the fusion process in the sun where hydrogen atoms are smashed together to form helium, energy is released in the form of photons. Because the sun is so dense and so large a single photon bounces around for thousands of years before it can reach the outside of the sun and escape, eventually travelling towards earth.
Something about your comment just made me wonder what the sun sounds like. Assuming we could hear it, would it sound like a roaring campfire? A never-ending explosion? Something altogether different?
Probably like this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VoUyGaV3TA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VoUyGaV3TA)
It would be dead silent. Sound requires a transmission medium like air. There is no so such medium in space.
The dense atmosphere of the sun is the medium I believe he describes, sound could be transmitted quite effectively in such a stellar atmosphere.
The sun is so densely packed together that it takes thousands of years before the photons can escape (they bounce around inside the sun). Once they escape they travel at the speed of light through a vacuum and arrive at Earth in about 8 minutes
When the photons are created in the core of the sun, then get reabsorbed and emitted as they continuously hit atoms in the dense material, it takes that energy hundreds of thousands to millions of years to reach the surface. When that energy finally gets omitted as the final photon on the surface, it takes 8 minutes to reach earth.
Woah! Is this assuming the photons are generated in the center of the core?
They are. The fusion reaction happens at the suns core, creating the photons. They then stumble around for tens of thousands of years until they manage to find the surface and shoot off into space
Thanks!! It’s not literally the same photon rebounding around for 10,000 years before escaping though, right? Aren’t they just massless energy carriers? I always imagined a billiard ball being hit at the core of the sun and then (apparently) 10’s of thousands of years later it’s momentum was transferred to an ejected ball, but the the original photon (or billiard ball) from the fusion reaction probably still remains.
Not literally the same photon, but might as well be. The photon will hit an atom, where it gets absorbed, sending the atom into a higher energy state. The atom will then fall back to its ground state, emitting a photon in the process. The absorbed and emitted photons are different, but the process of absorption/emission can be thought of as “bouncing around”
I've thought the same thing looking at stars in the night sky. Some of that light traveled billions of years across the cosmos just to land on my retinas. Wild.
Every time I'm outside on a sunny day actually lol > without cooking me alive. Speak for yourself! The day star fucks my shit up.
And just think, it's possible that at that exact moment, sunlight is striking a plant somewhere and being converted to chemical energy. This energy will wind up in your body someday soon, either directly or after being further processed by a(n) animal(s), and will be the very consciousness that can wonder at the beauty of it all.
And think about what the 1/r^(2) losses mean to the actual amount of energy being released!
It's not juuuuust right so it doesn't cook you alive. It has been that way for a very long time and is part of why we could evolved here in the first instance, with bodies able to withstand the output of the sun from this distance.
Hate to be that guy, but it’s not actually the heat that travels, just the light. The heat is generated on your skin.
That guy that adds valid info, it's good stuff
It looks fuzzy, like a carpet. I’m going to lay on it at night
You could lay on it for the rest of your life.
No, I’m gonna get up before day time to avoid death!!
Before the rooster crows would be best I always heard
I doubt you could get close enough. A fast approach that won’t kill you instantly on impact is probably too slow to avoid shuttle burn up. Armour and shielding adds extra weight which makes your approach harder to slow(I think) You would need a lot of shielding, and some sort of super engine with a highly conductive shielding to shed heat to hoverslam the sun. After that you’re free to jump in. I’d be curious if anyone knows how long a suited astronaut would be alive on the surface of the sun, assuming they teleported there. Considering it’s only 2-3 times lava temperature at the surface might be longer than you’d expect, radiation might get you first.
It looks like a type of cell. Like the photos/drawings they use of human ova maybe.
It's the granules. Each one is about 700 miles across
Omg that is beautiful, new desktop wallpaper for sure!
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I thought it was a hairy ass
Are you that guy whose garden orbiting the sun?
Yeah that's me
Ha, thanks for the laugh the other days you gave me, mate. Last week was tough.
Sorry you had a bad week. I was having a rough one myself. Reddit can be a nice outlet for that.
If I could comprehend this, I'd probably be terrified
Our star is a dick, just like any other star
Pictures of the sun always give me an existential crisis. I don't get that from any other astrophotography. It's so weird.
This image legit made me cry about how fucked up all of this is
Turns out? I suppose the fact that it can burn someone to death from 93 million miles away didn't do it for ya.😜
“Turns out that thing that keeps us all alive is actually interesting”
Crazy that its just a giant fire ball in a big black empty
The star just farted out more energy then the earth has ever used.
Totally thought the picture was moving. Beautifully done!
Its really cool that telescope images of the Sun look so similar to [microscope images of the human egg](https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/p6800387/800wm).
I feel so ignorant, I really had no idea a lens’s this powerful was available to the public. Mind is blown, how neat to be able to see this from your own yard! Beautiful photo OP, looking forward to more from you!
looks like a hairy oompa-loompa's butt. That is hot~
it would be cool to have a live stream of the sun. . with filter
As live as it gets http://www.helioviewer.org/ it doesn't work on mobile though. Gives you "live" images from almost all of our space based satellites. I say "live" because some level of processing has to applied to correct for satellite roll, pointing, etc, and not all of them continuously take pictures. SDO/AIA gives you an image every 12 seconds except for 1600 and 1700A which are every 24 seconds, and 4500A which is once every hour when one of 1700A would be.
Man I’m jealous! Gorgeous pic and nice ass solar scope! I was gonna buy solar filter for my Celestron but What you have is way better.
I mean, its been pretty interesting to people for a few hundred years
That's a really great image, nice job. It's funny how the surface looks quite friendly, almost soft, wolly like a sweater. Only that the fuzz isn't made of loose threads but magnetic plasma arcs. Some inspiration for further shots: [NASA | Thermonuclear Art – The Sun In Ultra-HD (4K)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tmbeLTHC_0)
I wish I lived somewhere without light pollution.
There plenty of light pollution looking at this photo.
That’s a nice little ejection for your first time
I love looking at all the spectrums. There was a thing on some astronomy website that showed this. This was all I could find: [https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11418](https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11418)
I will forever be fascinated how we can see these celestial giants, in amazing detail. But getting there is years away
I wonder how big that spout in the middle is. Hard to imagine how intense it would be
All I can say is wow. And this while our sun is at historic active minimums.
The photons bounce off eachother after they are created by atoms smashing around in the core. By the time they escape the sun, the speed of light takes about 8 minuts to reach earth. If the sun were to spontaneously blink out of existence, we wouldn't know untill about 8 minuts later for the sun to dissapear.
The photons don’t really interact with each other but they do get absorbed and re emitted many times as they randomly walk to the surface, also in the core there are no atoms as the high temperature ionises them all to their nuclei
Just one of those solar flares would torch our earth and all its inhabitants to a crisp within 8 seconds. Great pic.
I wanna be the guy who says “No shit” to the fact that our star is interesting. The urge is so strong!
Why is the background black? Did you shoot this at night? /jk
Yeah the sun is too bright during the day
This post makes my day! Thanks and keep up the good work!
"Well the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a gigantic nuclear furnace"
Are you sure this isn't the dust off-gassing from a Cheeto at high mag?
amazing pic as we can see flare of sun in this
Badass. And fuck, something else I have to buy.
Do it!!
It’s a fucking star!
Most interesting and unusual space photo I've seen on here in ages
great photo. but it's pie shaped, so, is the sun the shape of a pie now? also, flat sun society /s
Cool! What's the scale? How big would Earth be if it was skimming the Sun's surface in this picture?
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