What To Know
- After checking, it turns out to be a solar prominence, a sort of “loop” of plasma attached to the Sun.
- Like us explained it here Clara Froment, a researcher at the Laboratory of Physics and Chemistry of the Environment and Space at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, the Sun is at its peak of activity.
- According to NASA, “a prominence forms in about a day, and stable prominences can persist in the corona for several months, forming a loop that can stretch hundreds of thousands of kilometers into space.
Did you see a red “dot” near the bottom of the Sun during the totality phase? After checking, it turns out to be a solar prominence, a sort of “loop” of plasma attached to the Sun.
Like us explained it here Clara Froment, a researcher at the Laboratory of Physics and Chemistry of the Environment and Space at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, the Sun is at its peak of activity. “We are almost at the level of maximum activity,” she recalled, predicting during the eclipse of April 8 “more transient phenomena such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which are high-energy particles moving through the Solar System.” Our star kept its promise: it gave us a spectacular, glowing and very luminous prominence.
Solar prominence seen in 2010 by the SDO solar probe, compared to the size of Earth. Image: NASA/SDO In short, a solar prominence is made of plasma, an ionized gas composed mainly of helium and hydrogen. It comes from the chromosphere, the lower atmosphere of the star, and is therefore relatively dense and “cold” (about 9,000 °C). It extends towards the Sun’s warmer atmosphere, called the corona. The plasma follows the magnetic field lines and forms a kind of loop. According to NASA, “a prominence forms in about a day, and stable prominences can persist in the corona for several months, forming a loop that can stretch hundreds of thousands of kilometers into space. Scientists are still trying to understand how and why prominences form.”
