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NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is 5 years old, releases close-up video of the sun

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Lubricus

Member
The footage was probably in black and white, and they took some artistic choices to make it less bland.

This time-lapse video captures one frame every 8 hours starting when data became available in June 2010 and finishing February 8, 2015. The different colors represent the various wavelengths (sometimes blended, sometimes alone) in which SDO observes the sun.

Looks like the color was added.

https://www.youtube.com/user/NASAexplorer
 

BowieZ

Banned
Just to give an idea of the scale of this stuff.

G4kofSD.gif
I don't recall this, but thank God we weren't a few thousand miles to the right.
 

BowieZ

Banned
The scale in our universe is just mind boggling.
I mean just look at this:

1920px-Star-sizes.jpg
If one pixel is the sun, VY Canis Majoris has a diameter of about 720 pixels. That's 720 suns lined up side by side and you get from one side of VY Canis Majoris to the other.

But to fill up the whole star? You'd need almost 10 billion suns.
 
The scale in our universe is just mind boggling.
I mean just look at this:

1920px-Star-sizes.jpg

That is absolutely Beautiful.... looks so sureal, although reminds me of a cgi atheistic for some reason, although that is probably because its "different".

If you liked that video, I recomend this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIbfYsQfNWs

Amazing video featuring this still image. Earth botton left, next to OUR sun on scale with some other sun's we know off :)
If one pixel is the sun, VY Canis Majoris has a diameter of about 720 pixels. That's 720 suns lined up side by side and you get from one side of VY Canis Majoris to the other.

But to fill up the whole star? You'd need almost 10 billion suns.

One thing I feel this kind of volume comparison does is that it doesn't necessarily represent magnitudes as they are. take for example VY Canis Majoris which is often the last star shown in these comparisons making the Sun look tiny in comparison, but, while that star has a radius 1600 times larger than the sun, it only has something between 20 to 40 times the mass of the sun (so it is more massive yes, but not at the same order of magnitude, from wiki:
Wikipedia said:
VY Canis Majoris also illustrates the conceptual problem of defining the "surface" (and radius) of very large stars. With an average density of 0.000005 to 0.000010 kg/m3, the star is a hundred thousand times less dense than the atmosphere of the Earth (air) at sea level.

The most massive star we know of R136a1 which is only 265 times more massive than The Sun, still very big, but the order of magnitude/scale doesn't seem as big as when they do those visual comparisions.

They also obscure the fact, that our Sun is among the biggest stars in the galaxy (in the top 10% in terms of mass) with the most common type being uninteresting red dwarf stars
 

kyser73

Member
The most massive star we know of R136a1 which is only 265 times more massive than The Sun, still very big, but the order of magnitude/scale doesn't seem as big as when they do those visual comparisions.

I am very glad we're not in the stellar neighbourhood when that baby blows.

Awesomeballs on the NASA video. What I love most is seeing the curve of the magnetic fields visualised with those plasma streams.

I'm also very thankful for the Van Allen belts.
 
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