NASA’s IRIS Captures A Huge Sun Sneeze (CME)

http://planetsave.com/2014/06/03/nasas-iris-captures-huge-sun-sneeze-cme/



NASA’s IRIS Captures A Huge Sun Sneeze (CME)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration scored an impressive first a few weeks ago by capturing an enormous solar coronal mass ejection with its new Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph.

A CME is a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields that rises above the solar corona and may be released into interplanetary space. NASA explains the phenomenon viewed by IRIS and presented in the video below as a curtain or sheet of solar material erupting outward from the Sun at speeds of 1.5 million miles per hour. Coronal mass ejections are often associated with similar forms of solar activity such as solar flares, but no causal relationship has yet been established.



“This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited,” said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. Examining the spectra produced from imaging allows investigators to determine how much solar material is present at specific velocities, temperatures, and densities. The field of view seen in the video is about five Earths wide and about seven-and-a-half Earths tall.

When these ejections reach Earth, as they sometimes do, a shock wave causes a geomagnetic storm that may disrupt Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar energetic particles can intensify aurorae in large regions around Earth’s magnetic poles. Along with solar flares of other origins, CMEs can damage satellites, disrupt cell phone, GPS, and radio transmissions on Earth, and stop power lines from transmitting electricity, resulting in power outages. They can also emit intense, potentially lethal cosmic rays capable of reaching humans at high altitudes (airplanes or space stations).