Watch Massive Sunspot's Two-Week Trek Across Sun's Face (Video)

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | August 4, 2017 01:36pm ET


A gorgeous new video shows a giant sunspot rotating across the sun's face, firing off flares and an eruption of superhot plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the NASA-European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) tracked the sunspot, known as AR 12665, for nearly two weeks, from July 5 through July 17.

Sunspots, also known as active regions, are dark patches with slightly lower temperatures than the rest of the solar surface. These features tend to be launchpads for solar storms, as the new video shows.

- click for image -

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA2OC80NzYvb3JpZ2luYWwvU1BfMTcwODA0X3N1bnNwb3RfYXIxMjY2NV9zZG8uanBnPzE1MDE4NjE5ODQ=

This composite view of sunspot AR12665 is composed of visible and extreme ultraviolet light imagery captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO

The satellites saw two flares — outbursts of high-energy light — blast from AR 12665, one each on July 9 and July 14. Both were medium-size flares, clocking in at the M1 and M2 levels, respectively. (Scientists classify flares in a three-tiered system: "C" for weak flares, "M" for midlevel ones and "X" for strong ones. There is further subdivision as well; M2 flares are twice as powerful as M1 flares, for example.)

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