On April 19, 2010, NASA’s newly-launched Solar Dynamics Observatory caught a massive eruption on the Sun, called a prominence, as it blasted millions of tons of 60,000 K (100,000° F) gas off the surface of the Sun. Check out this amazing footage as the material blows upward, then rains back down onto the Sun’s surface.
Holy Haleakala! If you watch carefully, you can see little hot spots flash as the gas hits the Sun again. At about 31 seconds, a thin streamer comes screaming back down; look carefully where it hits and you’ll see those spots. This animation is actually about four hours worth of images strung together. (more…)
The Solar Dynamics Observatory, due for launch on February 9 at 10:30 Eastern time (15:30 GMT), is a revolution in solar observing: equipped with state-of-the art detectors, it’ll stare at the Sun and teach us far more about our closest star than we’ve ever had a chance to before. It’s like SOHO on steroids.
I was going to write up a lengthy post about it, but then I found out my friend Nicole Gravitationaliotta, aka The Noisy Astronomer, already put together a great post about it. That saves me time.
Something I want to point out: SDO will have a continuous science data streamrate of a whopping 16 megabytes per second. You might want to read that again. That’s 1.4 terabytes per day, or half a petabyte per year. Given that a Blu-Ray disk holds 50 gigabytes at most, that means SDO would fill 28 disks a day just to store that data. Cripes. That’s a vast amount of data to sift through. If the Sun is hiding anything, it has about a week to figure out what to do. After that we’ll be watching everything it does.
Also, a fun thing about this for me is that the project scientist for SDO is Barbara Thompson, a woman I’ve known a long, long time: her office was across from mine when I was working on Hubble, and I would often drop by to swap stories with her and generally mix it up. It’s very cool to know that an old friend will be helping run such a fantastic astronomical instrument.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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Also, a fun thing about this for me is that the project scientist for SDO is 
