Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2016 September 19 
Posted on 09/19/2016 5:06:00 AM PDT by ThomasMore
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2016 September 19
Explanation: What's happening at the edge of the Sun? Although it may look like a monster is rampaging, what is pictured is actually only a monster prominence -- a sheath of thin gas held above the surface by the Sun's magnetic field. The solar event was captured just this past weekend with a small telescope, with the resulting image then inverted and false-colored. As indicated with illustrative lines, the prominence rises over 50,000 kilometers above the Sun's surface, making even our 12,700-diameter Earth seem small by comparison. Below the monster prominence is active region 12585, while light colored filaments can be seen hovering over a flowing solar carpet of fibrils. Filaments are actually prominences seen against the disk of the Sun, while similarly, fibrils are actually spicules seen against the disk. Energetic events like this are becoming less common as the Sun evolves toward a minimum in its 11-year activity cycle.
(Excerpt) Read more at apod.nasa.gov ...
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Only if we go at night.
Shields at 100% Captain.
Never seen anything quite like that before - not in that detail.
I could never understand how the sun continues to produce energy after all these millions/billions of years without burning out.......
Better be Metaphasic shields or we're toast.
Me too. The amount of hydrogen compressed to the ignition point at its birth is simply beyond human comprehension.
It is burning out, but it is massively huge. Humans have difficulty comprehending very large numbers.
You can land on the dark side.
LOL
It’s Oryx! I kicked his ass on the dreadnaught...
Fake, I’m not even sure the sun is real ...
The amount of hydrogen needed to even collapse into a star is mind boggling. They say it takes about 1.4E29 kg of hydrogen for gravity to generate enough force to create pressures and temperatures high enough for the fusion reaction to begin.
Jupiter would have to be 75-100 times more mass in order for it to become a sustainable star. That’s a lotta mass!
Bozo the Clown lives on the sun!
Maybe; the monolith aliens in 2001 managed it, and that was a red giant, no less, which would have a much more active corona. Humans in the Uplift series (Sundiver) manage it with a refrigeration laser and phlebotinum-based hull material.
I think the one thing that’s going to someday give us anti-gravity, FTL travel, and other “science fiction” technology like the ability to fly close to or even into stars, is our ability to imagine that such a thing is possible. Our eventual solution to those goals may end up looking nothing like the ones we imagine, but we’ll get there nonetheless.
Looks like a red fuzzy ball. Is there a movie of the surface moving around?
Thanks. I also heard that the planets make noise. The last one of Jupiter was eerie.
Will we ever be able to get this close to a star?
Shields at 100% Captain.
Sure, you slingshot around the Sun, pick up enough speed - You're in time warp. If you don't, you're fried
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