Explanation: After a long solar minimum, the Sun is no longer so quiet. On August 1, this extreme ultraviolet snapshot of the Sun from the Solar Dynanimcs Observatory captured a complex burst of activity playing across the Sun's northern hemisphere. The false-color image shows the hot solar plasma at temperatures ranging from 1 to 2 million kelvins. Along with the erupting filaments and prominences, a small(!) solar flare spawned in the active region at the left was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME), a billion-ton cloud of energetic particles headed for planet Earth. Making the 93 million mile trip in only two days, the CME impacted Earth's magnetosphere, triggering a geomagnetic storm and both northern and southern auroral displays.
"Now I know," says David Sibeck, the scientist who is a member of the THEMIS project at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Plasma jets cause tremors space."
According to the project THEMIS, the jets crash into the geomagnetic field about 30,000 km above the Earth Ecuador. The impact causes a rebound process, in which the plasma actually bounces up and down along the magnetic field that is reverberating. Researchers call it "push repetitive flow." It's like a tennis ball bouncing upward succession of decreasing amplitude are due to energy dissipated in the carpet.
Re: APOD: The Not So Quiet Sun (2010 Aug 06)
Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2010 2:37 pm
by bystander
León wrote:"Now we know," says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Plasma jets trigger spacequakes."
Interesting collection of links with this APOD description - our sun, even though it has occasional outbursts, so far certainly isn't the drama queen that it might become as it reaches menopause .....
I noticed something that impacted me way back in high school (1955-1959) - in our physics class, we were taught the subject using the centigrade scale - I noticed that the centigrade scale was officially changed to the celsius scale in 1948 by the 9th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM). Shame, shame on my teachers!!!
Also, of interest, when I was listening to the Singing Sun audio, both my dog (asleep by my feet) and my cat (asleep on the table by the laptop) woke up - the cat kept nosing around the speaker on the computer; the dog raised his head, looked at me and kept "wincing" until I stopped the "music" ....
The Not So Quiet Sun
Don't forget to watch the video and listen to the song. 
