The Solar Optical Telescope from Japan’s Hinode spacecraft (Japanese for sunrise) took the video. It was launched in September 2006 to study the sunspots and solar flares on the Sun.

See the dramatic  VIDEO at the Science-at-NASA Web site.

Solar astronomers believed that the chromosphere was a fairly calm part of the Sun. However, these pictures show a completely different picture of the Sun’s chromosphere, the thin layer of the Sun’s atmosphere just above the photosphere. It is about 10,000 kilometers deep. The chromosphere means “color sphere”, which was given that particular name from the tremendous amount of hydrogen that emits light (at a wavelength of about 6,563 Angstroms) from this region of the Sun.

Solar physicist John Davis of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center describes the flares “as big as Texas” [“New Phenomena on the Sun”; the NASA quote in the title also originates from the same article.]

As mentioned earlier, the NASA video is at Web site: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/21mar_chromosphere.htm?list970856.

More information about Hinode appears at: (NASA) http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/02nov_firstlight.htm and (Japan) http://solar-b.nao.ac.jp/index_e.shtml.

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