Engraving of the Foucault/Fitzeau daguerreotype of the sun (1845)

It looks rather drab now, but the first photograph showing details of the Sun’s surface was a spectacular achievement when it was made — in 1845 — by French physicists Jean Foucault and Armand Fizeau.

Today, there are several satellites relaying images of the Sun from space, including NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) which was launched February 11, 2010, and now streams high-def video of our closest star. (The SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living With a Star program.)

Some of the most spectacular views of the Sun, however, still come from terrestrial observatories, like the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), 80 miles west of Los Angeles.

Built on the shore of Big Bear Lake (elevation, 6,750 feet) in the San Bernadino Mountains of California, BBSO houses the New Solar Telescope (NST), a 1.6-meter solar telescope — the largest of its kind in the world. The NST became operational in 2009 and is operated by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The Sun from BBSO showing granules

In the image above, captured last summer by the NST, we’ve highlighted a ubiquitous solar feature — granules. A granule is the top of a column made of hot matter (called plasma) streaming from within the Sun. As the plasma cools, it sinks into the dark lanes between the granules. Individual granules last only a few minutes, giving the Sun’s surface a churning or boiling appearance.

Without any familiar landmarks (or land, for that matter), it’s hard to grasp the size of these solar features. To help, we’ve taken an image of the Earth at the same scale and superimposed it over the picture of the Sun.

Sun and Earth at the same scale

When the massive size of these granule is combined with how quickly they form and dissolve, another solar characteristic is evident. Plasma flows across the granule at supersonic speeds of up to 15,000 mph producing sonic booms and sending waves racing across the surface of the sun.

Here’s a video taken by the NST last August, showing the granules in motion.

[Thanks to the NJIT and the BBSO for granting permission to show this video on our site.]

Sunscape 15

Our Star: The Sun

Like many others who lived through the Carl Sagin Cosmos Era, I’m mesmerized by images of distant galaxies, nebulae, and supernovae. With billion and billions of cosmic objects to explore, it’s easy to overlook the cosmic grandeur in our own neighborhood, the Sun. (The term “neighborhood” is used in its astronomical sense, given that the Sun is nearly 93 million miles from Earth.)

Yet, Sunscapes are beautiful and richly diverse, largely because the gases that make up the Sun have been superheated to the point that they are sensitive to magnetism. The patterns we see on the surface — and deep into the interior — are those unseen magnetic fields made visible by the hot gases. It’s a bit like “seeing” the wind by watching the patterns of movement in a wheat field as wind blows across the land.

The Sunscape above was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite launched in 2010 for a five-year mission studying the Sun. The SDO uses imaging devices so sensitive that the resulting data stream provides as much detail as a high-def screen. (You can read more about the SDO, here.)

The images provide scientists an unprecedented amount of data to help understand solar activity. These images also allow us to see the powerful beauty present in the Sun in ways we’ve never been able to — before the SDO.

The detailed image above was taken from the SDO daily photograph found in our widget at the top, right-hand corner of the page. To explore the full image, simply right-click on the widget photo, and choose “View image” from the drop-down menu.

Here’s a fascinating (and beautiful) video from NASA showing how the SDO works:

From the Solar Dynamics Observatory:

On April 19, AIA observed one of the largest prominence eruptions in years. The huge structure erupts, but a great deal of the plasma (hundreds of millions of tons) is unable to escape the gravitational pull of the Sun and falls back down as “plasma rain.” As the rain impacts the surface, bright flashes can be seen as the momentum is absorbed on impact. SDO is the first observatory to capture both the rain and the impacts, allowing us to learn a great deal from observations like this.

(Spoiler alert: Look for the plasma rain begin its fall at about eighteen seconds.)

And what is “plasma?” Glad you asked. According to NASA’s glossary:

A fourth state of matter (in addition to solid, liquid, and gas) that exists in space. In this state, atoms are positively charged and share space with free negatively charged electrons. Plasma can conduct electricity and interact strongly with electric and magnetic fields. The solar wind is actually hot plasma blowing from the sun.