Mysterious Dark Circle Near Sun Was Coronal Cavity

What Was Mysterious Dark Circle Near Sun?

© 2012 by Linda Moulton Howe

 

“As part of coronal mass ejections (CME) from quiet
Sun regions (not from magnetically active regions with sunspots in them),
we believe there often is a big sausage-shaped structure floating above the solar
surface, underneath which a curtain of cool, dense material exists.”

– Karel Schrijver, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, AIA Instrument,
NASA Solar Dynamic Observatory

See 21-second YouTube edited mp3 video excerpted from hours-long
solar video on March 11, 2012. Original video from NASA’s Solar Dynamic
Observatory (SDO) and its Atmospheric Image Assembly (AIA) based in the Lockheed
Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL), Palo Alto, California. AIA provides
full-disk imaging of the Sun in several ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet (EUV)
band passes at high spatial and temporal resolution. See SDO AIA.

 

March 15, 2012   Palo Alto, California, and Huntsville, Alabama – Recently YouTube videos about the March 11, 2012, solar event above were buzzed about on the internet because everyone wondered what the big “circle,” or “sphere” was and what it was doing with the dark tendril extending down to the surface of the sun.  The original source of the video is NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) and its Atmospheric Image Assembly (AIA) based in the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL), Palo Alto, California.

On March 14, I took the mystery to solar physicists at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. No one there had ever seen such video before, but Rodney Viereck, Ph.D., Section Leader in NOAA’s Research and Customer Requirements Section, said he thought it was related to conditions around a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) and suggested I contact Karel Schrijver, Ph. D., Principal Investigator of the AIA instrument on the Solar Dynamic Observatory that also carries two other instruments, HMI and EVE, each with its own science team.

I asked him electronically:  “NOAA’s Rodney Viereck, Ph.D., solar physicist, suggested I email you the short SDO video below that I also sent him from March 11, 2012, in my inquiry as a science reporter about what was happening with the dark tendril that extends to a dark, curved area?”
21-second YouTube edited mp3 video

Dr. Schrijver replied:  “What we are looking at in this movie is a fairly common feature [coronal cavity], but in an unusual configuration so that we see it much more clearly than otherwise often is the case. As part of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from quiet Sun regions (i.e., not from magnetically active regions with sunspots in them), we believe there often is a big sausage-shaped structure floating above the solar surface, underneath which a curtain of cool, dense material exists. The sausage if often rather empty; that is, it is a dark void. When such a void is curved, we don’t see it quite as clearly because we would be looking through the void and the surrounding bright background corona. In this case, it appears that the void is a rather straight cylinder, oriented such that we are looking right along its spine and hence the rather clearly defined dark void.

“Our scientific colleagues do not fully understand what happens underneath such voids, but they are often associated with fairly cool, dense material that absorbs the coronal glow (and thus looks dark). When looked at from the side, this forms a moving wall of solar gases that move up and down in a complex pattern (called a filament or prominence). In this case, we look straight along its length also, so that it looks like a string connecting void to surface.

“The movie shows the void rising ever faster (as part of a corona mass ejection). The magnetic field underneath it is stretched like rubber bands, which at some point break, and partly retract back to the Sun, partly follow the coronal mass ejection.

“I have attached another movie below with a better coverage (so that the cavity and filament do not vanish from one frame to the next, but are seen to rise rapidly but fairly smoothly).”

March 11, 2012, SDO/AIA video at approximately 12 hours U.T. as magnetic field filament
erupts into coronal mass ejection and the coronal cavity disappears. MP4 video from Karel Schrijver, SDO/AIA.

 

I also talked about the video with David Hathaway, Ph.D., Solar Physicist and Heliospheric Team Leader at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Dr. Hathaway recognized the image as a coronal cavity where a magnetic filament formed – what some web viewers were calling the “umbilical cord.”

David Hathaway, Ph.D., Solar Physicist and Heliospheric Team Leader at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama:  “What people are calling the ‘umbilical cord’ – that dark filament feature – it’s dark because it’s absorbing the x-rays. It’s cool and dense and if  we had the same images at the same time from one of the other filters such as Helium 304, that feature would have appeared bright instead of  dark. It’s emitting light from plasma at a much cooler temperature.

What happens is that there are magnetic configurations on the sun where the hot material – this is at a million degrees+ in the corona – can condense out into these magnetic structures and form filaments that appear dark against the solar disc in most wavelengths. So I think this is a coronal cavity from which the magnetic filament has condensed.

[ Editor’s Note:  The surface, or photosphere, of the sun is about 10,000° Fahrenheit (5,500° Celsius). Cool, dark areas of magnetic disturbance that erupt on the photosphere, called sunspots, are only about 6,700° Fahrenheit (4,000° Celsius).
The layer of the sun’s atmosphere that lies just beyond the photosphere, called the chromosphere, is only about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) thick. Where it meets the photosphere, the chromosphere is about 7,800° Fahrenheit (4,300° Celsius). The temperature rises throughout the chromosphere. Where the chromosphere merges with the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, the corona, it is about 180,000° Fahrenheit (100,000° Celsius). Temperatures rise to 3,600,000° Fahrenheit (2,000,000° Celsius) in the part of the corona that’s farthest from the sun. The sun is hottest at its center—about 27,000,000° Fahrenheit (15,000,000° Celsius).    Sources: Abell, George O. Realm of the Universe, 5th ed., pp. 225-28;  Asimov, Isaac. Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Earth and Space, pp. 159-61;  Moore, Patrick. Atlas of the Solar System, p. 19. ]

 

WHAT IS A CORONAL CAVITY?

It’s a place where coronal material  has cooled down and condensed into magnetic structures in the form of a filament, the ‘umbilical cord.’  If you look at the filament itself, you can see the material in it twisting around and at the end of the short little clip that you sent me, you see this thing erupt. And that often happens. A filament eruption is another type of solar eruption along with solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).  But the filament is cooler material. That’s the odd part, but late in the video movie you see the whole thing erupt. You can actually see the filament take off and that cavity disappears.

WHY IS THE CORONAL CAVITY SO CIRCULAR?

That’s the surprising thing to me  – how circular it is, so symmetrical. Temperature is certainly a part of it. Temperature is definitely why we can see the dark filament between the coronal cavity and the sun’s surface. The material in the filament is dark because instead of being at a million degrees, it’s only at 100,000 degrees. It’s much cooler. Part of the coronal cavity is really less dense material there because that part of the corona is being drawn off into the magnetic filament. So the dark cavity is a combination of temperature and less density. Other coronal cavities wouldn’t be as symmetrical as this one, so it’s an exceptional example. But there is often a coronal cavity underlying a CME and often a magnetic filament associated with a CME. There was a smooth, oval-shaped coronal cavity photographed in 2002 before a coronal mass ejection.

July 22, 2002 image of an oval-shaped coronal cavity in bright area on right before
a coronal mass ejection. Image by High Altitude Observatory, NCAR, Boulder, Colorado.

 

HOW LONG DID THE MARCH 11, 2012, CORONAL CAVITY AND FILAMENT LAST?

The video clip you sent me shows that the filament erupted and the sphere disappeared at about 12 hours Universal Time (UT) on March 11, 2012. The movie I saw has a time stamp starting about  6 hours UT.

SO IT WAS AN EVENT THAT LASTED AT LEAST SIX HOURS.

It might have been longer than that  because in the video where it starts, the circle and filament are already there, so it might have been there prior to the start of the video.

 

Edits in the SDO Videos On YouTube

IN THE YOUTUBE SHORT 20-SECOND VIDEO I EMAILED YOU, THERE ARE EDITS IN THE TIME STAMPS. DOES NASA’S SDO/AIA  EDIT ANY OF THE VIDEOTAPES THAT ARE GOING OUT TO THE WEB?

I’m pretty sure that most of it is all mechanized. We are constantly downloading these images from SDO through a receiving station at White Sands, New Mexico. They have computer scripts that are written to automatically accumulate the images and turn them into a movie.

I don’t think there is an awful lot of human interaction as to let’s take that image and that image. It’s a program something like take every 5th image and put them together over the last 48 hours and put it on the web. And then do it again and again and again.

SO SDO/AIA ARE NOT EDITING THEIR SOLAR VIDEOS.  THE EDITING IS IN THE PUBLIC DOWNLOADING SDO VIDEOS AND PUTTING EXCERPTS ON YOUTUBE?

Certainly there are some jumps in the NASA data, but certainly anyone who posts data on YouTube  is capable of editing out bits and pieces so that the video goes quicker.

The human employees don’t have time all day to put together the SDO movies that are new every 48 hours! Also, there is a movie for each of the filters! So it’s all mechanized as far as a computer script that accumulates images and runs it through a program that turns it into a movie and posts it at the SDO website in different filter options.”

 

What’s A Coronal Hole?

The next day on March 12, 2012, after the unusual coronal cavity and magnetic filament event, the sun produced a triangle-shaped coronal hole that is also considered an unusual shape. Coronal holes are defined by the magnetic fields that are coming straight off the sun into the solar system and not looping back into the sun, as Dr. Hathaway points out.

March 12, 2012, at 22:28:00 UTC, coronal hole triangular pattern image provided
by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, Boulder, Colorado.

David Hathaway, Ph.D.:  “A coronal hole is where you are looking down on the sun and at these instrument wavelengths like the NOAA image above, the coronal hole appears dark because the solar material is thinner and the magnetic field lines are coming  off the sun out into the solar system. So the sun’s magnetic field does not trap that coronal material and keep it near the sun’s surface. In a coronal hole, the magnetic field lines are threaded out into the solar system and the material escapes off the surface of the sun in the form of the solar wind. That’s why a coronal hole looks dark to us.

 

SDO:  Closest Humans Have Ever
Watched the Sun All the Time

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is a NASA mission launched on
February 11, 2010, to observe the Sun constantly and closely until 2015. Four sets of mirrors
were built by the Smithsonian for the NASA solar mission. Illustration by NASA.

ARE YOU SEEING THE SUN NOW IN A SURPRISING WAY BECAUSE SDO IS SHOWING SUCH CLEAR IMAGES ALL THE TIME?

Since its launch two years ago, the nice thing about SDO is that it sees the whole sun in detail immediately. SOHO takes hours to process its data, but you can go to SDO and see the sun from one minute ago!

WHAT DO YOU SAY TO WEB VIEWERS WHO ARE WATCHING SDO, SEE A CIRCLE OF DARKNESS OR A TRIANGLE-SHAPED CORONAL HOLE AND WANT A REALITY CHECK?

I think they need to recognize that all of the features we see in the sun’s corona have their origin in magnetic fields  – whether it’s like the circle or the triangle, ultimately it’s associated with a magnetic field configuration. There’s enough complexity there, we’ve even seen a duck pattern and all sorts of things in the coronal holes.

For certain, the circle configuration was exceptional in that Wow! It’s got a really sharp edge and very circular. That is unusual.”


More Information:

For further reports about solar cycles, flares and auroras, please see reports below from Earthfiles Archive.

• 03/01/2012 — Updated 030112: Solar CMEs Hitting Earth’s Magnetic Fields – Do They Make Strange, Loud Sounds?
• 11/22/2011 — Updated: Will Solar Cycle 24 Maximum Be Weakest in 100 Years and Go to Grand Minimum without Sunspots?
• 04/01/2011 — Will 2013 Solar Max Be Half the Size of Solar Cycle 23?
• 10/30/2009 — How Long Will Our Sun Remain Quiet and Cosmic Rays Increase?
• 10/06/2009 — Cosmic Rays Reaching Earth At Highest Level in 50 Years
• 05/02/2009 — Long Minimums Usually Mean Weaker Maximums, But Sun Could Still Have Big X-Flares in 2011 to 2012
• 04/30/2009 — Part 2: First 2009 U. K. Crop Formations Counting Down to 2012?
• 09/23/2008 — Solar Wind Pressure Lowest in 50 Years
• 08/29/2008 — Still No Sunspot Action on the Sun
• 01/10/2008 — Solar Cycle 24 Has Begun
• 01/13/2007 — Confusing Sun: Will Solar Cycle 24 Be Most Intense On Record?
• 08/23/2006 — Solar Cycle 24 – Headed for Intense X Flares by 2010-2012?
• 11/18/2005 — Is the Sun Heating Up?
• 09/23/2005 — 9 X-Class Solar Flares Between September 7 – 19, 2005.
• 02/11/2005 — Sunspot Region 720 Emitted Strongest Solar Radiation Since October 1989.
• 10/29/2003 — Fifth Intense Solar X-Flare – What’s Happening On the Sun?
• 10/25/1999 — A Blast of Solar Wind Provokes Aurora Over Northern U. S.


Websites:

Coronal Cavities:  http://people.hao.ucar.edu/sgibson/CIP21/topcampaign.html

Solar Dynamics Observatory:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Dynamics_Observatory

Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA):  https://aia.lmsal.com/

AIA Daily Solar Image Movies:  http://sdowww.lmsal.com/suntoday/index.html?suntoday_date=2012-03-13#

SDO AIA Temperatures:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDO_AIA_Temperatures

Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Solar_%26_Astrophysics_Laboratory

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