This ultraviolet image is updated every 4 hours. More about the image.

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SOHO The image is generated by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which sits partway between Earth and the Sun. It is updated every 4 hours. SOHO's Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) instrument produces the view. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

About this solar image

We asked Joe Gurman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where this image is produced, what the picture shows us.

This real-time ultraviolet image of the Sun measures a mid-temperature region of the Sun in a transition zone between the surface and the roughly 1-million-degree corona (the Sun's atmosphere), Gurman says. Brighter and darker features are all manifestations of the Sun's magnetic field -- the brightest areas indicating strong magnetic fields.

Dark stringy areas cooler than the corona and are called filaments; when they appear outside the disk of the Sun, they're called prominences. The fuzzy glow around the disk is relatively cool material that is ionized -- collisions of particls have stripped electrons off the atoms. Mottled areas are known as the chromospheric network, where strong magnetic fields congregate.

Bright spots in the background of space represent cosmic rays or charged particles that have been accelerated when a coronal mass ejection collides with the ambient, but ever-changing solar wind. (For more, see Space Weather 101.)

-- Robert Roy Britt

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