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Space Science

SOHO Produces Images of Sunspot Interiors 45

Posted by michael from the ride-the-light dept.
Judebert writes: "The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO, the one that looks at the Sun) has used a Doppler-like device to look underneath the surface of a sunspot. It turns out to be much shallower than expected, but the data does help explain why sunspots last so much longer than theory dictates. NASA's story is more informative, but the pictures and movies at Stanford are spectacular. I've got a new background!"
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SOHO Produces Images of Sunspot Interiors More

SOHO Produces Images of Sunspot Interiors

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  • Pimpin' science sitez like nobodyz bizness.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Platinum Dragon ( 34829 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:30AM (#2537164) Journal
    SOHO's main page [nasa.gov] is a blast in general, pardon the pun. The up-to-date images of the Sun just look cool, and it has a pretty comprehensive set of links to information about that big thermonuclear furnace about 93 million miles thataway *points at big glowing thing in sky*.

    It's also rather good for reminding oneself that there are things far greater than ourselves, and our own self-made problems and petty arguments. Insert quote from Babylon 5: "And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder" here.
    • Another surprise: Sunspots are surprisingly shallow. Conditions in sunspots change from cooler than the surrounding plasma to hotter than the surrounding plasma just 3000 miles below the surface.

      Sure, as shallow as 3000 miles is, I guess. :)

      The cool part of a sunspot has the shape of a stack of two or three nickels.

      Nickels the size of Mexico, anyway...
  • and Oh Yes, the sounds:

    BelowSunspot_rendering.mp3 (3 Meg) [stanford.edu]

    Ever wanted to know what a sunspot sounds like? Now's your chance! Just don't trade it on MusicCity, or Hilary'll get ya!
  • This sort of makes you realize just how relative measurements really are....and how really small humans and our problems are on a cosmic scale.... Kind of dangerous, actually....'anyone remember the nefarious device from _The_Resteraunt_at_the_End_of_the_Universe_, the "Total reality perspective vortex", or whatever it was called? Excuse me whilst I quietly go insane from the scale of things.....

  • Even more important in the future... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zergwyn ( 514693 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @08:22AM (#2537226)
    From the site:

    "Why do we care? Understanding sunspots is essential for understanding the 11-year solar cycle, solar flare explosions, and huge coronal mass ejections that affect life and society on Earth."

    Solar flares can screw up satellites and such, but as people begin to move into space more(missions to mars in the next 50 years, moon in possibly less, aren't beyond the realm of consideration anymore) this will become even more important. Getting caught by a flare without any of the protection Earth's magentosphere offers is a quick way to get fried. Any interplanet ship would obviously have to have some kind of shielding(probably between water/fuel tanks), but being able to more accurately understand and predict flares, especially for cheaper/shorter moon trips, will be vital.
    • "....but as people begin to move into space more(missions to mars in the next 50 years, moon in possibly less,..."

      I am a believer myself, but i don't believe nasa can pull it off in the near future. You are right, protection from these flares is essential for future missions ( cfr "red planet" :-)

      Nasa is getting cut in budget every year and i believe it has become to much of a slow (non flexible ?) organisation for coping efficiently with their honourable task (getting us up there).

      The cheaper, faster, better solution prooved to fail (i remember a quote like : " cheaper, faster, better : pick any two ").

      Maybe the Russians aren't that stupid, sell space, they finance half of their space program with :-)

  • APOD (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hmmm, just finished checking APOD.
    http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
    Load /. and this is the latest "news" go figure.

    Check out a real astronomy site if you want real, consistent astronomy.

  • Acne? (Score:4, Funny)

    by topher1kenobe ( 2041 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @08:50AM (#2537266) Homepage
    Sol is a relatively young sun, no? Could it be that our sun is merely experiencing acne?

    • Nah, Bald Spots (Score:3, Funny)

      by pagsz ( 450343 )
      Actyally, it's about 5 billion years old, and expected to live another 5 billion; so it's more like middle-aged. So, it's more likely bald spots. Now, if we could only find a star-sized dose of Rogaine . . .

      If it's worried about it's age, maybe scientists could find a hot little proto-star.

      In no way implying that the sun needs to get laid,

  • MSNBC Coverage (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Angry Black Man ( 533969 ) <vverysmartman@ho[ ]il.com ['tma' in gap]> on Thursday November 08, 2001 @09:14AM (#2537304) Homepage
    MSNBC also has a story with more pictures as well as a video right over here. [msnbc.com] A pretty well written article (If not as in-dept as the stanford one) and the video interview is pretty interesting.
  • 93,000,000 words.


    Sigh, now if I just had a real printer. Some of this stuff is definitely frame-worthy.

  • In Ringworld Engineers, when Louis Wu describes the Hindmost's fate aboard the unstable structure as the chance to "Study sunspots from underneath," the Puppeteer, instead of rolling up into a ball, could simply have replied "We already have that technology; your people invented it years ago." Of course that was hardly the point, as the Hindmost, Wu, Chmee, and all the Ringworld population appear to be doomed when it would crash into its sun. But it brings up the question: there any science fiction written during the sixties and seventies that hasn't been outdated or at least modified in some way by the constant march of science reality?

    --Jim
    • I think it's pretty common that science fiction gets outdated by the march of science fact. Very few scientific theories are so solid that they don't change much from decade to decade, and those aren't the ones that SF authors tend to speculate about. SF authors tend to talk about theories which are at the cutting edge, or even speculative, e.g. time travel, black holes, FTL travel. There's nothing exciting about classical mechanics in a SF story. (Although CM is exciting in other ways, baby) In general, I think just about everything in SF will be invalidated at some point, because it's about stuff so speculative. Remember Asimov's ships traveling through hyperspace in the Foundation, and the pilot was using a sliderule?

      More in response to your comment, though, how exactly does this new sunspot stuff invalidate Niven's story there? Perhaps I'm being dense, but I'm not sure what connection you're making.
      • It didn't invalidate the story, but it made Wu's remark about studying sunspots less dramatic. Niven might have changed Wu's remark... or maybe not. Ringworld was going to crash into its sun, and the shadow squares before that, regardless. What strikes me as odd is that, of all the things in that story that could be affected by technological progress in the real world, the study of sunspot interiors is probably one of the last I'd pick.

        The point about Asimov's slide rule is a good one. I've always found it interesting that Asimov's people read books on "spools" of magnetized wire. How 1950's does that seem?

        --Jim
        • Maybe I was being dense, I think I see now what you mean about Niven.

          It's funny how SF works. There are things which seemed absolutely futuristic in 1950 which we would consider trivial now, and, on the other hand, there are things that probably every SF author thought would happen, but we have yet to go there.

          Noone really could have predicted computers, and they've affected our world so much, it makes much of SF kind of silly in some ways. But we haven't progressed in other areas. For example, our energy technologies haven't really been revolutionized; the same ideas are sitting around, and we're not really implementing them. It seems like most SF of the 50s counts on cheap, clean energy in the future, but we haven't made much of a move towards that.

          On a slightly different note, I think Alternate History, a genre which is similar to SF, somehow works much better. It seems like the political stuff is much more predictable than the scientific. If you read older AH, it's not so crazy in the way old SF is.

          Don't get me wrong, though... some old Heinlein or Asimov stuff is sweet, even if the tech is off.
        • The MDI technology doesn't look all th way into sunspots. It definitely doesn't answer all questions about them. It simply allows us to look deeper into sunspots than we have before. This is allowinf us to validate and expand on some theories about sunspot activities.

          Being able to examine sunspots from below (presuming that you could survive) would answer (and raise) alot of questions about sunspots that are still unresolved.

          I don't think that Wu's comments are made any less dramitic by current tech. I think it was a morbid joke based on the (low) probability of surviving an examination of the underside of a sunspot -- and how much the thought of doing something like that in person would traumatize the average puppeteer.

  • Fractals? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Merlin42 ( 148225 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @09:42AM (#2537371)
    Is it just me or did the sunspot in the animations from the stanford page look like a mandlebrot set?
    • Yeah, that's crazed out... it does look a lot like a Mandelbrot.

      Honestly, though, I'm willing to say that that's gotta be a coincidence

  • "the data does help explain why sunspots last so much longer than theory dictates."

    You mean the universe doesn't always work the way us little humans think it should?

  • Field or Flow - which comes first? (Score:3, Informative)

    by wnknisely ( 51017 ) <wnknisely&gmail,com> on Thursday November 08, 2001 @11:06AM (#2537703) Homepage Journal
    "We discovered that the outflowing material was just a surface feature," said Zhao. "If you can look a bit deeper, you find material rushing inward, like a planet-sized whirlpool or hurricane. This inflow pulls the magnetic fields together."

    The cool thing for me (and I confess upfront that I don't remember much about plasma flow in stellar atmospheres) is the question of which comes first now - the magnetic field disturbance or the plasma flow.

    I know that a hot ionized plasma will freeze the magnetic field lines to the plasma - and that as the plasma moves it will drag the field with it.

    So what's happening here? Is the magnetic field causing the whirlpool ala the Babcock model - or is there some sort of convention flow pulling the magnetic field along with it?

    Anyone more current than I know?

    • It's been a couple of years since I did any stellar or plasma physics, but from what I remember in order to retain cohesion as they rise through the convective layers of the solar atmosphere magnetic flux tubes twist, and if the twisted tube rises through a rotating convection region it will be deflected preferentially poleward. The combination of which will either cause the flux tube to disperse relatively quickly or lock it into the described whirlpool behaviour depending on the direction of rotation (ie clockwise in one hemisphere, counterclockwise in the other).

  • Holy Schnikies! (Score:2, Funny)

    by mjh ( 57755 )
    Anyone else read this and think, man my small office/home office is *CRAP* compared to some guy who's producing sunspot images!

    Maybe it's just me, and I have SOHO inferiority complex.
  • I figure most any SOHO [soho.org] could make these up with nothing more than Photoshop and a couple of hours.
  • This is a pretty week display of our tax dollars at work. Staring at the sun.
  • For that matter, it was also covered on APOD [nasa.gov] today. :)

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