3-D Solar Tsunami Video Shows the Extreme Waves Are Real | Wired Science | Wired.com

Description

A 60,000-mile-high wave of super-hot plasma blazing across the sun's surface at 560,000 mph? Yep. Now we know. Solar tsunamis are real.

“Now we know. Solar tsunamis are real,” said John Gurman of the Solar Physics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in a press release Tuesday.

NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory has confirmed that the crazy circular bursts on the surface of the sun, rising higher than the Earth is wide, aren’t just optical illusions.

STEREO consists of two spacecraft pointing at the sun, one ahead of Earth in its orbit and one behind, that acquire stereoscopic images of the sun to give a sort of three-dimensional view, similar to the way our two eyes do.

Though these solar tsunamis, technically known as fast-mode magnetohydrodynamical waves, were first seen by the SOHO mission more than a decade ago, the single spacecraft couldn’t determine if the wave was real or the shadow of a coronal mass ejection. But in February the STEREO twins were perfectly poised to catch the eruption of a sunspot that spawned a wave, seen in the movie above.

“It was definitely a wave,” George Mason University scientist Spiros Patsourakos, lead author of a paper on the solar tsunamis in August in The Astrophysical Research Journal Letters, said in a press release. “Not a wave of water,” he adds, “but a giant wave of hot plasma and magnetism.”

The spacecraft have also spotted waves crashing into other solar structures.

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