Dr. Kevin Reardon has taken a spectacular photograph of the surface of the Sun. The Daily Mail reports:
The twisting tubes, known as spicules, are around 300 miles in diameter and spurt upwards from the sun at supersonic speeds of 45,000 mph. They can be likened to pipes of gas, each as wide as a small country and as long as half the Earth.
In the lower right is a small sunspot, a dark patch of cooler gas on the sun’s surface. Sun spots can last for days or months and numbers rise and fall in a cycle lasting around 11 years.
The picture, taken by astronomer Dr Kevin Reardon, covers a relatively small proportion of the sun’s surface, just 65,000 square miles.
Dr Reardon, a space scientist at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in Florence, Italy, said: ‘It gives us an idea of the details of the individual structures, but also how they are then all interconnected or intertwined or woven together.’
Spicules erupt into the reddish, thin layer of the solar atmosphere that lies above the sun’s surface.
At any one time there are up to 70,000 active spicules, each typically stretching 5,000 miles. They live for just five to ten minutes before fading and falling back down.
There's more at the link, including the full-size photograph. Here's a small portion of that picture, the bottom right-hand corner only, including the sunspot referred to above.
Spectacular, isn't it? The full-size version is well worth viewing. Recommended.
I love pictures like this. Whenever we humans get too full of ourselves and our supposed 'cleverness', along comes Nature to remind us that we're very insignificant indeed in the cosmic order of things.
Peter
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