NASA Images the Entire Sun, Far Side and All
Source: time.com
It might not seem obvious why anyone should care what’s happening on the other side of the Sun. But NASA can explain: our home star is a seething, roiling ball of superhot gas that goes through cycles of relative quiet, punctuated by violent outbursts. Every so often, the Sun spits out a blob of charged subatomic particles — and occasionally, one of them is aimed directly at the Earth.
These eruptions, known as coronal mass ejections, aren’t enough to hurt the planet physically; they’re very hot, but also very insubstantial. What they can do is fry the electronics of communications satellites, and even put astronauts in danger of a radiation overdose. These electronic storms are part of the broader phenomenon known as "space weather," and it’s good to have as much warning as possible when the Sun is looking angry.
The problem is that its angry face might be turned away from us, and it takes 12 days or so for the far side to rotate into view. That’s one major reason that NASA launched the twin STEREO spacecraft (for Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) in 2006 to take up positions orbiting on opposite sides of the Sun. The satellites constantly image the Sun in several different wavelengths of light, which come from various layers near the Sun’s surface, because the sunspots and magnetic storms that generate space weather — just like hurricanes and thunderstorms on Earth — have a three-dimensional structure.
The satellites are in the same orbital path as Earth, more or less, and have just taken up their final positions — one is where we’ll be in three months, and the other where we were three months ago. (The first has NASA’s least imaginative name to date: STEREO A, for "ahead." The second is called STEREO B, for...you can probably guess.)
To celebrate, NASA just released an image of the far side of the Sun, showing our star in all its glory, and even a movie showing what you’d see if you could zip around the entire Sun today.
And for the record, the current space weather forecast doesn’t include any storms on the interplanetary horizon.
Article from: time.com
Image: Source: NASA
NASA | STEREO reveals the Entire Sun
Video from: YouTube.com
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