Watch: 25 years of the sun
Eleanor Imster in SPACE | December 10, 2020
This video, merging more than 2 decades of footage from SOHO cameras, captures thousands of sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections breaking out from the sun.
Eleanor Imster in SPACE | December 10, 2020
This video, merging more than 2 decades of footage from SOHO cameras, captures thousands of sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections breaking out from the sun.
On December 2, 2020, ESA released this cool video montage of 25 years of the sun’s activity, as observed by a space observatory called SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory). Since its launch on December 5, 1995, SOHO’s cameras have captured thousands of sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections that continuously break out from the sun.
As you watch this video, be sure to check out the moon and stars in the background!
SOHO moves around the sun in step with the Earth, by slowly orbiting around what’s called L1, the first Lagrangian point, a position in space about a million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth, where the combined gravity of the Earth and sun keep SOHO in an orbit locked to the Earth-sun line.
All previous solar observatories have orbited the Earth, so their observations were periodically interrupted as our planet “eclipsed” the sun. But SOHO’s unique orbit gives it an uninterrupted view of the sun. ESA explained in a statement:
What becomes clear as the sun turns and years pass and background stars whirl by, is how constant the stream of material is that is blasted in all directions – the solar wind. This constant wind is interrupted only by huge explosions that fling bows of material at vast speeds, filling the solar system with ionized material and solar radiation.
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