Hi Image of the Month: Hot Lucky Solar Eruption!.

Hi Image of the Month: Hot Lucky Solar Eruption!.

Fig 1.1: Lucky Solar Eruption.

NASA's IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) spacecraft was launched last year to provide very detailed, high resolution images of what's going on at the surface of the Sun. 

- "The Sun, mind you, is a big place, and IRIS can't look at all of it at once." 

Furthermore, it takes a while to get IRIS focused on the areas that astronomers want it to be focused on, so whenever IRIS needs to start looking somewhere new, it takes about a day to make it happen.

Fig 1.2: Solar Collage.

This long timeframe and small field of view means that to see things that happen fast, like solar eruptions, scientists can't do much better than make educated guesses about where they're going to happen and then just hope they get lucky and on May 9, for the first time, they did.

The video below is IRIS' view of the Sun ejecting a huge cloud of charged particles (called a coronal mass ejection) out into space at about 1.5 million miles an hour. 

The field of view of the video is about five Earth-diameters vertically, and seven Earth-diameters horizontally. 

The entire Sun, to put that in perspective, is about 109 Earth-diameters across, so the view we're getting here is extremely detailed. 

Detailed enough that you might want to consider putting on some sunblock if you're sitting too close to your monitor.