Sun surface

The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minumum - in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year - with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm, but are continually monitoring our closest star with an array of telescopes and satellites. Seen below are some recent images of the Sun in more active times.

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO <b><a…

Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York is an amateur astrophotography enthusiast who captures amazing photographs of the Sun through a telescope in his

SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

The Sun has been pretty active lately, popping off a series of fairly powerful X-class flares; they've been generating aurorae and other magnetic...

Like many stars, the sun is prone to sudden outbursts. Erupting from the star's surface, these events sometimes sling globs of charged particles and sun-stuff in Earth's direction. If they're powerful enough, these coronal mass ejections can produce geomagnetic storms that damage satellites and disrupt power grids.

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An artificially created image of the Sun

Photograph by NOAA/NASA GOES Project The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the United States’ largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists …

Fire like the sun

Science Education - The roiling surface of the sun. Each one of these cells is hot plasma that has boiled up from below the surface. Each cell is about the size of Texas, but much, much hotter #Astronomy

A greeting card-maker by day, Alan Friedman pursues his true passion once the night falls - he sets up his special gear and starts making some fascinating pictures of the Sun right from his backyard. Buffalo-based astronomy lover uses a small (3 ½” aperture) telescope with a Hydrogen Alpha filter and an industrial webcam to capture the surface of the Sun, which looks surprisingly calm and fluffy in the final version.

Solar Dynamic Loops Reveal a Simultaneous Explosion and Implosion, Plus Evidence for Magnetic Reconnection July 2, 2013 — Movies of giant loops projecting from the surface of the Sun are giving new insights into the complex mechanisms that drive solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs).

The sun: a solar flare

up-close sun | ralph smith

NASA PhotoNews: A Solar Filament Erupts