Now You Can See the Sun Up Close
Have you ever found yourself staring at the sun? Well, if you did, you probably shouldn’t because you can burn your retinas and cause temporary or permanent blindness. Since you can’t really look at the sun directly, it is hard to tell what it really looks like, until now. Thanks to NASA, you can now look at the sun directly without losing your sight.
Last year, NASA recorded the sun for an entire year at their Solar Dynamics Observatory. Nicholeen Viall, who is a solar physicist at the Goddard Spaceflight Center showed the images taken from the observatory. Viall’s field of study watches the dynamics and activity going on in the solar corona, the sun’s atmosphere. As she showed the images, she also explains the different ways the sun works in relation to the active regions, magnetic loops, filaments and the coronal mass ejections of the giant fireball.
There is still a lot of unresolved issues for solar physicists to figure out, like why the solar corona is hotter compared to the sun’s surface, but with these images, they are heading in the right direction.
So….. if you want to find out how the sun actually looks like upfront, here is a time-lapsed video brought to you by NASA. Check it out!