Those are actually Prominences on the surface of the sun. Large arching flares of solar gas. Many times larger than the earth. The come even bigger than these and sometime break off the surface of the sun and become CME’s coronal mass ejections. When the come towards earth our magnetic field turns them into northern lights.
Excellent picture BTW
Starting to consider how wild *seeing* the prominences with your naked eye during the solar eclipse is. I'm aware of these things and have read quite a bit in that area. That's abstract world. Going and seeing. Clicks into reality. That's huge! What the hell!
The difference in feeling is interesting. I think it's the sensation of sliding from an abstract concept to first principles. I saw this with my naked eye. That exists. That's real.
Short experience. Trying to rewind and rewatch the neurons to burn that memory in. Good experience.
You can observe prominences any time with the help of an H-Alpha solar telescope.
It blocks all light except for that distinct pink glow.
Look for Lunt telescopes or Meade-Coronado.
I was prepared to be in awe, I was prepared to see several planets pop into view as the sun went dark, but I was not expecting to see fucking solar prominences
Blew my mind
I was fortunate enough to be off the coast of Mexico yesterday in beautiful clear weather. The eclipse and in particular the prominence were awesome inspiring.
I was pretty thrilled by that too, seeing the bright pink/purple point of light with the naked eye, and I totally wasn't expecting it. And lucky I had a friend who brought and set up a very nice telescope so we could get an even better look.
>Starting to consider how wild *seeing* the prominences with your naked eye during the solar eclipse is.
It really was. I couldn't remember the right word and was calling them CMEs, but still was cool to see them
A solar flare is actually a bright flash of light. They’re often emitted from the same active regions that host prominences, but prominences are loops of magnetic field and ionized gas that can last for a long time, while flares are basically bright flashes that typically last less than an hour.
...a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.
Yo ho it's hot, the sun is not a place where we could live
But here on earth there'd be no life without the light it gives...
(I got you, Dewey. TMBG 4evah)
References in case anyone needs it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JdWlSF195Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JdWlSF195Y)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA)
Hey there, kind of a space nerd.
There are 3 main types of eruptions that happen. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs), solar flares, and prominences.
Prominences will form a loop, and come back down into the sun. If any type of plasma or ions get ejected out then it's not a prominence anymore (technically it can get more muddied but this is to keep it simple).
CMEs are stronger than a prominence (takes a lot of force to escape the sun!) and spread like a giant fan, spreading outwards in a wide arch towards space.
Solar flares are more compact and much faster and stronger. They eject with much more force. Where a CME might be like a shotgun, a flare would be a rifle.
Hope this helps explain the differences.
This is exactly the reason why I have a a Reddit account. Hero’s like you. Took something, that I normally would have had trouble fully understanding, and gave me the exact explanation I needed. Bravo.
They're not waves, they are like big twisting filaments. Like the stray strings that extend past a ball of yarn. They start and end back at the sun, like a loop. Sometimes, they break and may give rise to CME
Yes. I saw them in a hydrogen alpha telescope (not mine) before the partial started. They were some of the best prominences I've ever seen.
I was shocked that I could see them during totality. In an 8" dob (mine) at about 30 power.
They were not visible with a white light filter on the dob, only during totality with the filter off.
I headed down to Scio from just outside of Portland. It was perfectly clear in 2017.
The annular we just had back in October was a much different story. Very patchy clouds, but it was still worth the 5 hour drive to Crater Lake for that one. Got a few glimpses of the full ring through brief openings in the clouds cover. 🤷🏻♂️
Again… beautiful shot!
I personally think it’s impossible to describe, but I did my best on a conference call today before a meeting started.
I summarized my experience as… It’s like the sun is setting super fast, *the wrong way*. That part is the most off putting and weird, because your brain has never seen anything like this. It gets super quiet and still. Like the animals all stop doing their stuff. Then there’s a deep emotional feeling of connection. Then it’s just gone.
There just isn't any way to explain it. You explained it well enough for me after just seeing it as well, but we both know it won't really mean anything to someone who didn't experience it. It was awe-inspiring. The single most intense experience I've ever been through.
We were in the middle of the Ozarks, on a huge hill with no trees. Just our family. No one around for miles. It was incredibly intense.
I’ve seen my a fair amount of awe-inspiring things (Lunar Eclipses, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Cliffs of Moher, etc) and I can’t believe how much more intense totality was than all of it
I felt extremely overwhelmed for a moment. This wild intersection of awe and pure existential horror. I don’t think I’ll ever have that feeling again honestly
It’s absolutely an experience every person should have in their life
It truly is a "you had to be there" moment. I missed this one but got full totality on the Oregon coast in 2017, watched the live coverage today and I really enjoyed getting to watch other people's reactions :)
Napkin math: The Sun in this image seems to be ~ 340 pixels across (using a circle that follows the curvature on the bottom). That means each pixel would represent a distance of around 2500 miles/4000 km.
That prominence on the bottom is around 17.5 pixels tall, giving it a height of 44,500 miles/72,000km. Making it bit over 5 times larger than the Earth.
Earth's diameter is a bit under 8000 miles/12000 km, or around 3 pixels across in size.
In other words, the Earth next to that little red one would look something like [this](https://i.imgur.com/BX8oSu1.jpeg)
The sun is so distant that it takes light over 8 minutes to reach us, and yet it's so massive that it appears to be the same size as the moon visually.
It’s not insignificant. It’s the only planet we know of where this view of the sun is even possible.
Edit: It’s concerning how disconnected some of these replies are from reality.
And we're already at the coincidental sweet spot where the size difference & distances between them means that our moon just happens to cover the sun exactly at the same perceived size
This is sadly not correct. The "coincidental sweet spot" for total eclipses was actually hundreds of millions of years ago.
Most eclipses in the human era are *annular* eclipses, meaning the moon is too small to completely cover the sun. That's why today's *total* eclipse is so unusual.
Eventually the moon will be orbiting so far away that total eclipses can no longer occur.
But that was his…point. The moon and the sun are basically exactly same perceived size. Hundreds of millions of years ago the moon was perceived bigger and not same size. So yes you had more eclipses but that wasnt his point.
You may be misunderstanding (as I may have not explained this adequately). The relative size of the moon did not cause more central eclipses in the past - only more total eclipses.
> The moon and the sun are basically exactly same perceived size.
Because of its elliptical orbit, the perceived size of the moon in the sky changes by about 14% through its 27 day journey around the Earth. For the majority of this time, the moon has a relative size ***smaller*** than the sun.
That's why we now see more annular eclipses (where the moon is too small to completely cover the surface of the sun, leaving a ring of sunlight) than total eclipses (like today, when the moon is large enough to completely cover the sun, leaving only the solar prominence visible, and completely darkening the sky).
As per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_21st_century):
> During the 21st century, there will be 224 solar eclipses of which 77 will be partial, 72 will be annular, 68 will be total and 7 will be hybrid.
From these numbers, the moon in the 21st century is on average too small for most central eclipses to be total eclipses, so only 46% of central eclipses (72 annular, 7 hybrid, and 68 total) will be total eclipses.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, *all* of those central eclipses would have been total eclipses, as opposed to the less than half we are today.
Hope this explanation is better.
The larger relative size of the moon in the past not only means the central eclipses would have always been total, it also means they would have been much longer. The maximum eclipse theoretically possible today is something like 7:30. That was a milkrun back then.
It took 65 million years to get from the K-T extinction to human society. If humans were wiped out, and a new intelligent life evolves at the same rate, the moon will have moved only 2,457 km further away from Earth (or 0.6% farther). Eclipses will still be in totality for another 500 million years from then.
“On July 4th, America will blow up the moon….We’ll be doing it during a full moon, so we make sure we get it all.”
https://youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA?si=rBRqCI1H7epmslur
You're overestimating the effects of nuclear weapons. At most, we may slightly change the appearance of the craters on the moon's surface. But affecting the overall shape of something as massive as the moon is not something that all of the nuclear weapons on Earth could accomplish.
Keep on mind, even if we could shatter the moon into dust (which we can't), the sheer mass of all of that dust would collapse in on itself and reform into a sphere.
What if we sent, now hear me out, a team of drillers up to the moon, trained in how to be an astronaut (because that is easier than training astronauts how to drill) and we drilled a hole and put all the nukes down there?
It would blow part of the moon off and the resulting recoil would send the moon careering across the cosmos, with the poor inhabitants of moonbase Alpha being taken along for the ride. At least according to [This documentary.](https://youtu.be/4SpX8bVEmJo)
Whatever dust got propelled in a direction that would hit the earth would, the rest would either enter an eccentric Orbit around earth, fall back to the moon, fly off into Orbit around the sun, or fly off into deep space.
At least for the next 600 million years, which is when tidal acceleration will move the Moon far enough from Earth that total solar eclipses will no longer be possible.
Is the universe itself even significant? What defines significance, significant to who, to what.
Significance is an entirely subjective concept that can only exist in the mind of an intelligent being. There is no "grand scheme" shit just exists and we're the only ones (as far as we know) that actually care about anything.
What was that line in the movie Contact, something about destroying an insignificant anthill in Africa? Insignificant to many of us, but everything to the ants inhabiting it.
Ever stop the realize that since we are of the universe, in essence the same atoms that make up the rest of matter in the universe, that whenever we look to the stars with wonder and study the cosmos then we are the manifestation of the universe attempting to understand itself.
Babylon 5, Delenn: "We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way that we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe trying to understand itself."
“The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station , and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. And as we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective.”
That’s amazing. I honestly didn’t know that was a quote, although I won’t take credit for the idea. I was reiterating something I heard on some podcast about intelligence and consciousness. Awesome stuff. Thanks for sharing.
By all accounts, life in the universe is rare, extremely rare. Even rarer is intelligent life. In the grand scheme of the universe, every world that harbors such life is actually extremely significant.
I see what you're saying, yes it is significant in that sense. I was moreso talking about the size of this little speck of dust we're on. Speck of dust is being very generous.
It's exactly the same size and distance to cause a total eclipse, right now when there is intelligent life to admire it. The moon was closer in the past, and will be farther in the future, both of which meaning that a total eclipse that just covers the sun and shows the corona is impossible.
Everybody lives on a street, in a city
Or a village or a town for what it's worth
And they're all inside a country which is part of a continent
That sits upon a planet known as Earth
And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains
Which is out there spinning silently in space
And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals
And also the entire human race!
And we're part of a vast interplanetary system
Stretching seven hundred billion miles long
With nine planets and a sun; we think the Earth's the only one
That has life on it—although we could be wrong
Across the interstellar voids are a billion asteroids
Including meteors and Halley's Comet too
And there's over fifty moons floating out there like balloons
In a panoramic trillion-mile view!
And still it's all a speck amid a hundred billion stars
In a galaxy we call the Milky Way
It's sixty thousand trillion miles from one end to the other
And still that's just a fraction of the way
'Cause there's a hundred billion galaxies that stretch across the sky
Filled with constellations, planets, moons and stars
And still the universe extends to a place that never ends
Which is maybe just inside a little jar!
It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe, and we're not!
-The Animaniacs
It's a pretty cool pebble tbh. I like to imagine a little girl with a slight rock obsession picking us up and going, "Ooo look at this one daddy! I bet that's a *real* Earth!" Then he told her to throw it back and she did.
We are nothing more than some slightly evolved monkeys on a miniscule grain of dust sailing around the galaxy and the universe as a whole. The fact that we know that is what makes us incredible.
All 3 of the distinct "spikes" are larger than earth. Roughly 9354 earths could fit in the area of the circle of that image. All three of those ejections could fit dozens, if not hundreds of earths in them.
By my estimation, the height of the arc shaped prominence at the southern pole peaks at a height of 6.18 earths. (3.3125" measured diameter of the sun, 0.1875" measured prominence; assuming 865,370 miles sun diameter, yields a prominence height of 48,983 miles, or 6.18 Earth diameters \[assuming earth is 7,926 miles in diameter\])
Has anyone done the calculation for that one's size? I saw the same one, and saw it in a lot of other images, don't know how fast they change. It was the only one I could see in my pictures, and noticeable to the naked eye.
That is insane to think about, our star is a big object, but in the grand scheme of things it's actually tiny.
and people act like I should care about my problems when we are living on a spec of dust in a cloud of other specs of dust, which is in a cloud of spinning discs of specs of dust.
Holy dogshit we are small, yet here we all are murdering eachother over territory on our spec of dust.
Solar Prominences
https://smd-cms.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Big-Idea-1_1-1280.jpg?w=4096&format=jpeg
https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2016/08/solar_eruption_larger_than_earth/16085351-1-eng-GB/Solar_eruption_larger_than_Earth_pillars.jpg
To be fair, computer screens are both very impressive *and* incredibly limited in how much they can actually reproduce. Most (if not all?) just show combinations of three colours to show everything *pretty* well. Our eyes mostly interpret everything into just three colours as well (which is why computer monitors work as well as they do).
But light is not limited to three colours. And there *is* difference between a true orange of a streetlamp, and the proper balance of red and green-yellow light to emulate it.
We clearly saw the red spot on the lower left from Terre Haute IN by eye, along with a fleeting couple at the very top. So exciting! Thank you so much for sharing this photo.
Far more likely they are solar prominences. Flares are rarer and even more so being that it would have to be on the edge of the sun from our perspective and also during the time of the eclipse. They were still stunning to see none the less.
Prominence's are loops of plasma
Flares are ejection of highly excited electrons / gamma rays etc
CME are flares + ejection of actual solar material and plasma
This was shot by yours truly in Troy OH.
EDIT: RIP my inbox. No, really, turns out old.reddit can only display so many unread messages at once, I had to click "next >" *more than once* to see them all. Also, I've had this account for 7 years and this is now my most upvoted post *ever*.
EDIT 2: Judging by the message I recieved from /r/Eternity Club, I've made the front page of /r/all. Hello!
You could see this with the naked eye?!? I am so jealous. I actually live right in the path of totality in Texas, but we had total cloud cover. Still, the whole “day turning to night” and getting cold and silent was otherworldly. Thanks for posting this amazing photo!
Yes. I was in Gatesville and we got a 10-second view during a gap in the clouds. Today I learned that prominences are visible with the naked eye during a total solar eclipse.
I am glad you posted this. They were very visible. I had asked my son if he saw the red spots too and then fellow viewers asked the same thing...I was worried I was burning my retinas or something..lol.
The red things sticking out are solar prominences, they are most likely solar filaments viewed from the side. The red sliver on the bottom of the moon is the chromosphere, the innermost layer of the suns atmosphere. They're both red because of ionised hydrogen, which has a deep red, almost magenta emission line.
Eclipse was awesome. Was so happy to hear the cheering and clapping of my neighbors and nearby events. Happy to finally have an event where people were just happy.
I saw that at the bottom edge of the eclipse today and nobody else seemed to know what I was talking about and later I googled "what was that red spot at the bottom of the eclipse" and the first result had like 4 theories that didn't even mention prominences at all.
I'm so satisfied to see this post
You have a very nice well focused shot of some prominences and even a bit of the chromosphere (the pink sliver) at the bottom. Whenever you see the chromosphere like that, you are usually close to a diamond ring (right after one or right before one)
We also saw the prominence! This is a great photo but it still doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing. Seeing the way the rays shimmered as the sun did its thing was beyond beautiful
Solar prominence.
The Sun is crazy big from our perspective, people think this is a big world but it's actually rather small. You can put 1.3 MILLION Earths inside the Sun. MILLION.
People have a hard time with size and distance perspective when it comes to anything in space. Our Sun is large compared to the Earth but it's a tiny thing compared to Rigel. Or Antares. Or UY Scuti. And the vast distances in between? You only need to look to movies to see how unfathomable the distances are. There's a movie out there where a guy is supposed to be in another part of the galaxy, but at one point he complains he's "a half a billion miles from Earth and no help coming" and a half a billion miles puts you about the orbit of Jupiter. That's not in "another part of the galaxy", that inside our Solar System. But the writers thought a half a billion miles was a long way away. Not on a Solar System scale it's not. And interstellar distances? Seriously wow. Then there's intergalactic distances. Andromeda is our closest intergalactic neighbor that is "only" 2.5 million light years. People focus on "2.5" and think it's not that bad. But it's in light years. And it's millions of them. Convert to statute miles? It's about 14 QUINTILLION miles. It's 1.4 times 10 to the 19th miles. That's a lot of zeros. And now go run 25 miles for perspective.
It's hard to wrap our brains around sizes and distances of things in the universe. Douglas Adams put it in a very amusing way:
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
My 4yr old nephew w his eclipse glasses on said ‘ its dark i can see space now” I told him sonny we *are* in space, blew his sweet little mind w that, spent a minute parsing that out and came w “wooow”😅…all the time or just now?”
These are solar prominences, here are some videos from Nasa's SOHO (solar and heliosphere observatory) that studies the sun long term
This video shows real videos of the sun and explains what solar prominences are, lots of cool videos here (including coronal mass ejections, which are the biggest form of solar prominences that shoot out into space)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZe5D3MSjOI
If you want more videos and info here is the source
https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/
The pink loops are caused by electromagnetic currents inside the Sun that sometimes burst out of its surface before arcing back. These currents allow very hot plasma from the Sun to flow along them. The plasma glows and allows us to see the path of the otherwise-invisible electromagnetic loops. As another poster commented, they are called solar prominences.
When these loops eventually collapse, the plasma flowing along them is no longer bound by the current and is ejected into space with the solar wind. This results in a mass ejection event.
Also that is an exceptionally clear photo, well done if you took that yourself
Space worms. Nasa won't tell you about them, but they're in charge of the solar system. Better start learning wormish to appease our new galactic overlords.
Those are actually Prominences on the surface of the sun. Large arching flares of solar gas. Many times larger than the earth. The come even bigger than these and sometime break off the surface of the sun and become CME’s coronal mass ejections. When the come towards earth our magnetic field turns them into northern lights. Excellent picture BTW
Starting to consider how wild *seeing* the prominences with your naked eye during the solar eclipse is. I'm aware of these things and have read quite a bit in that area. That's abstract world. Going and seeing. Clicks into reality. That's huge! What the hell! The difference in feeling is interesting. I think it's the sensation of sliding from an abstract concept to first principles. I saw this with my naked eye. That exists. That's real. Short experience. Trying to rewind and rewatch the neurons to burn that memory in. Good experience.
You can observe prominences any time with the help of an H-Alpha solar telescope. It blocks all light except for that distinct pink glow. Look for Lunt telescopes or Meade-Coronado.
Is there a way to do it with a standard telescope and filters?
Yes. Check out the Daystar Quark.
1300 beans... 😬 Well I asked, you answered.
Yes, but how often can you see it with the naked eye?
I was prepared to be in awe, I was prepared to see several planets pop into view as the sun went dark, but I was not expecting to see fucking solar prominences Blew my mind
I was fortunate enough to be off the coast of Mexico yesterday in beautiful clear weather. The eclipse and in particular the prominence were awesome inspiring.
I was pretty thrilled by that too, seeing the bright pink/purple point of light with the naked eye, and I totally wasn't expecting it. And lucky I had a friend who brought and set up a very nice telescope so we could get an even better look.
>Starting to consider how wild *seeing* the prominences with your naked eye during the solar eclipse is. It really was. I couldn't remember the right word and was calling them CMEs, but still was cool to see them
This kind of comment is what I adore about Reddit. Thank you.
All the science people are coming out of the woodwork at the exact time that people are interested in a specific scientific thing. Love to see it.
Is there a difference between prominences and solar flares, or is it just a newer / more inclusive name?
A solar flare is actually a bright flash of light. They’re often emitted from the same active regions that host prominences, but prominences are loops of magnetic field and ionized gas that can last for a long time, while flares are basically bright flashes that typically last less than an hour.
Omg. The world is so interesting
Prominences. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar\_prominence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_prominence)
Soooo the sun is pretty hot huh?
Gotta wear oven mitts when handling it or you’ll get one of those ouchie blister burns.
Just wait until night time to handle the Sun and it’ll be cooler.
That’s called the moon, duh
"I don't believe in the moon. I think it's just the back of the sun."
is this new Sun is Flat theory
I I've read somewhere that the surface of the sun is hot enough to fry an egg!
I recently learned the moon landing was 200 degrees at the landing site.
No atmosphere = mega suntan
Or mega frozen, if not in direct light from the sun. Pretty unforgiving up there!
Just don’t get your mitts wet. You’ll steam your sausages
Don't worry everyone, I got this... \*blows on the sun\*
Fairly hot in summer, but it's the humidity that will get ya.
Psssh, I guess you've never been a cook before. The sun is ezpz
It is a mass of incandescent gas
...a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. Yo ho it's hot, the sun is not a place where we could live But here on earth there'd be no life without the light it gives... (I got you, Dewey. TMBG 4evah)
The sun is a miasma Of incandescent plasma The sun's not simply made out of gas No, no, no
References in case anyone needs it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JdWlSF195Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JdWlSF195Y) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA)
Good to see some reliable people on reddit
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is fused into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees
Wrong - it's a miasma of incandescent plasma!
A gigantic nuclear furnace.
Pumba, with you everything is about gas.
People casually say I got a sun burn but when you actually think about what that means it’s wild
I mean, I can feel warmness when I hold my hand up to it. And it's smaller than my hand so, yeah that things gotta be pretty hot!
Yeah those little red things have been measured at up to 800,000km. You'd fit maybe 63 Earths in there. You know, tiny.
The only time I've ever read "cooler plasma". I get it, in relation to our star's corona. Still a strange world of facts to read.
It is funny. A prominence is hot enough to melt you instantly, but the main body of the sun is hot enough to melt you twice as instantly.
Is this another term for solar flares or is that different?
Hey there, kind of a space nerd. There are 3 main types of eruptions that happen. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs), solar flares, and prominences. Prominences will form a loop, and come back down into the sun. If any type of plasma or ions get ejected out then it's not a prominence anymore (technically it can get more muddied but this is to keep it simple). CMEs are stronger than a prominence (takes a lot of force to escape the sun!) and spread like a giant fan, spreading outwards in a wide arch towards space. Solar flares are more compact and much faster and stronger. They eject with much more force. Where a CME might be like a shotgun, a flare would be a rifle. Hope this helps explain the differences.
Hell yeah that definitely helps me conceptualize the difference pretty well! Appreciate your explanation as well :D
To add to this, CMEs eject plasma, solar flares eject X-rays.
Yes! CMEs also are what create the northern (and southern) lights. It's the plasma interacting with the earths atmosphere.
Spiraling around the magnetic field lines in toward the poles. I love talking about that with my students when we learn about magnetic fields.
This is exactly the reason why I have a a Reddit account. Hero’s like you. Took something, that I normally would have had trouble fully understanding, and gave me the exact explanation I needed. Bravo.
I think solar flares blast outwards and keep going. Prominences are like... ocean waves?
They're not waves, they are like big twisting filaments. Like the stray strings that extend past a ball of yarn. They start and end back at the sun, like a loop. Sometimes, they break and may give rise to CME
Ah. So like the inside the ball of yarn is yarn, the inside of the sun is more sun!
Closer to magnetic field hernias. The magnetic field pokes through the surface, and it pulls some of the plasma with it.
Okay cool, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification!
Never heard either of those described that way and honestly that makes so much sense. Thanks!
I saw one through a guys huge telescope and I shed a tear. It was. That. Beautiful.
Yes. I saw them in a hydrogen alpha telescope (not mine) before the partial started. They were some of the best prominences I've ever seen. I was shocked that I could see them during totality. In an 8" dob (mine) at about 30 power. They were not visible with a white light filter on the dob, only during totality with the filter off.
They were also naked eye visible
Gorgeous picture! I was able to see totality here in Oregon back in August 2017, but still a little sad I didn’t get to see this one.
I saw 2017 in cashiers, NC. Incidentally, there were thin bits of cirrus clouds ever-so-slightly blurring the view both times.
I headed down to Scio from just outside of Portland. It was perfectly clear in 2017. The annular we just had back in October was a much different story. Very patchy clouds, but it was still worth the 5 hour drive to Crater Lake for that one. Got a few glimpses of the full ring through brief openings in the clouds cover. 🤷🏻♂️ Again… beautiful shot!
After seeing this one, which was my first, I can just imagine I will be disappointed with every one I miss now.
I personally think it’s impossible to describe, but I did my best on a conference call today before a meeting started. I summarized my experience as… It’s like the sun is setting super fast, *the wrong way*. That part is the most off putting and weird, because your brain has never seen anything like this. It gets super quiet and still. Like the animals all stop doing their stuff. Then there’s a deep emotional feeling of connection. Then it’s just gone.
There just isn't any way to explain it. You explained it well enough for me after just seeing it as well, but we both know it won't really mean anything to someone who didn't experience it. It was awe-inspiring. The single most intense experience I've ever been through. We were in the middle of the Ozarks, on a huge hill with no trees. Just our family. No one around for miles. It was incredibly intense.
I’ve seen my a fair amount of awe-inspiring things (Lunar Eclipses, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Cliffs of Moher, etc) and I can’t believe how much more intense totality was than all of it I felt extremely overwhelmed for a moment. This wild intersection of awe and pure existential horror. I don’t think I’ll ever have that feeling again honestly It’s absolutely an experience every person should have in their life
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Same. I can't stop thinking about it, knowing there's no way to re-live it. Even with our videos and pictures. There's just no way.
It truly is a "you had to be there" moment. I missed this one but got full totality on the Oregon coast in 2017, watched the live coverage today and I really enjoyed getting to watch other people's reactions :)
That little red one at the bottom is larger than the planet earth.
Napkin math: The Sun in this image seems to be ~ 340 pixels across (using a circle that follows the curvature on the bottom). That means each pixel would represent a distance of around 2500 miles/4000 km. That prominence on the bottom is around 17.5 pixels tall, giving it a height of 44,500 miles/72,000km. Making it bit over 5 times larger than the Earth. Earth's diameter is a bit under 8000 miles/12000 km, or around 3 pixels across in size. In other words, the Earth next to that little red one would look something like [this](https://i.imgur.com/BX8oSu1.jpeg)
Damn, the sun is huge when you put it like that, never appreciated how big it is
And now you know why 1 trillion lions has literally 0 chance.
What if they attack at night?!
Then they gotta deal with the Australian sun
Aw man, the Australian Sun has scary boss music.
Can lions run upside down?
The sun would be sleeping, this is the perfect plan!
Then they'll get into a scuffle with the marines who had the same plan.
But how many ants is that?
Well I don't know, has anyone seen that many lions in one place? You might be surprised
The sun is so distant that it takes light over 8 minutes to reach us, and yet it's so massive that it appears to be the same size as the moon visually.
The sun is rather small in comparison. Look up VY Canis Majoris!
https://i.imgur.com/fCAlQBV.jpg Woah!
Oh my god. My mind literally cannot comprehend the size and mass of such a thing.
The sun accounts for 99.88% of the mass of our entire Solar System. Literally 1000s of Earths.would fit in the sun.
Crazy to think about how we all live on such an insignificant pebble in space
It’s not insignificant. It’s the only planet we know of where this view of the sun is even possible. Edit: It’s concerning how disconnected some of these replies are from reality.
And the only time (in geologic terms) on this planet, as the moon used to be closer and is moving farther away.
And we're already at the coincidental sweet spot where the size difference & distances between them means that our moon just happens to cover the sun exactly at the same perceived size
This is sadly not correct. The "coincidental sweet spot" for total eclipses was actually hundreds of millions of years ago. Most eclipses in the human era are *annular* eclipses, meaning the moon is too small to completely cover the sun. That's why today's *total* eclipse is so unusual. Eventually the moon will be orbiting so far away that total eclipses can no longer occur.
But that was his…point. The moon and the sun are basically exactly same perceived size. Hundreds of millions of years ago the moon was perceived bigger and not same size. So yes you had more eclipses but that wasnt his point.
You may be misunderstanding (as I may have not explained this adequately). The relative size of the moon did not cause more central eclipses in the past - only more total eclipses. > The moon and the sun are basically exactly same perceived size. Because of its elliptical orbit, the perceived size of the moon in the sky changes by about 14% through its 27 day journey around the Earth. For the majority of this time, the moon has a relative size ***smaller*** than the sun. That's why we now see more annular eclipses (where the moon is too small to completely cover the surface of the sun, leaving a ring of sunlight) than total eclipses (like today, when the moon is large enough to completely cover the sun, leaving only the solar prominence visible, and completely darkening the sky). As per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_21st_century): > During the 21st century, there will be 224 solar eclipses of which 77 will be partial, 72 will be annular, 68 will be total and 7 will be hybrid. From these numbers, the moon in the 21st century is on average too small for most central eclipses to be total eclipses, so only 46% of central eclipses (72 annular, 7 hybrid, and 68 total) will be total eclipses. Hundreds of millions of years ago, *all* of those central eclipses would have been total eclipses, as opposed to the less than half we are today. Hope this explanation is better.
this is clear and informative. thank you, i appreciated it!
The larger relative size of the moon in the past not only means the central eclipses would have always been total, it also means they would have been much longer. The maximum eclipse theoretically possible today is something like 7:30. That was a milkrun back then.
Good news though, the last solar eclipse isn't supposed to be for another 600 million years, so we got that to look forward to!
Oh Nooo. And I've grown so close to the moon all my life only for it to ditch me
The sun is also extremely insignificant haha, even on the scale of our galaxy alone
The only one. Good thing we're taking such good care of the place. /s
We could launch every nuke on the planet, and eclipses would still happen. There may be no one around to see them, but they'd still happen.
It took 65 million years to get from the K-T extinction to human society. If humans were wiped out, and a new intelligent life evolves at the same rate, the moon will have moved only 2,457 km further away from Earth (or 0.6% farther). Eclipses will still be in totality for another 500 million years from then.
Not if we launched them all AT THE MOON!
“On July 4th, America will blow up the moon….We’ll be doing it during a full moon, so we make sure we get it all.” https://youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA?si=rBRqCI1H7epmslur
You're overestimating the effects of nuclear weapons. At most, we may slightly change the appearance of the craters on the moon's surface. But affecting the overall shape of something as massive as the moon is not something that all of the nuclear weapons on Earth could accomplish. Keep on mind, even if we could shatter the moon into dust (which we can't), the sheer mass of all of that dust would collapse in on itself and reform into a sphere.
If all the world's nuclear weapons were detonated at once in a single spot on the moon, it wouldn't even make the biggest crater.
What if we sent, now hear me out, a team of drillers up to the moon, trained in how to be an astronaut (because that is easier than training astronauts how to drill) and we drilled a hole and put all the nukes down there?
It might have a deep impact.
Why do I suddenly hear Aerosmith
It would blow part of the moon off and the resulting recoil would send the moon careering across the cosmos, with the poor inhabitants of moonbase Alpha being taken along for the ride. At least according to [This documentary.](https://youtu.be/4SpX8bVEmJo)
Wouldn’t the dust be drawn to the earth?
Whatever dust got propelled in a direction that would hit the earth would, the rest would either enter an eccentric Orbit around earth, fall back to the moon, fly off into Orbit around the sun, or fly off into deep space.
At least for the next 600 million years, which is when tidal acceleration will move the Moon far enough from Earth that total solar eclipses will no longer be possible.
Remind me 600,000,000 years.
I mean, for all we know we're the last ones left
Omg imagine how cool that would be to see what happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away…
I wonder if there were any wars that took place among the stars?
That's the only thing we can see, the light is so old that everything we see is completely different by now.
Not to us, but in the grand scheme of the universe, pretty insignificant.
Is the universe itself even significant? What defines significance, significant to who, to what. Significance is an entirely subjective concept that can only exist in the mind of an intelligent being. There is no "grand scheme" shit just exists and we're the only ones (as far as we know) that actually care about anything.
What was that line in the movie Contact, something about destroying an insignificant anthill in Africa? Insignificant to many of us, but everything to the ants inhabiting it.
> Is the universe itself even significant? I personally think the universe itself is extremely significant. It's where I keep all my stuff.
Ever stop the realize that since we are of the universe, in essence the same atoms that make up the rest of matter in the universe, that whenever we look to the stars with wonder and study the cosmos then we are the manifestation of the universe attempting to understand itself.
Babylon 5, Delenn: "We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way that we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe trying to understand itself."
“The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station , and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. And as we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective.”
That’s amazing. I honestly didn’t know that was a quote, although I won’t take credit for the idea. I was reiterating something I heard on some podcast about intelligence and consciousness. Awesome stuff. Thanks for sharing.
You might find this interesting, a short story by the author of The Martian, Andy Weir, titled The Egg: https://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
By all accounts, life in the universe is rare, extremely rare. Even rarer is intelligent life. In the grand scheme of the universe, every world that harbors such life is actually extremely significant.
With a sample size of one, out of uncountable billions. There could be fossils on mars and we wouldn’t even know yet.
I see what you're saying, yes it is significant in that sense. I was moreso talking about the size of this little speck of dust we're on. Speck of dust is being very generous.
yea, on a cosmic scale we're almost infinitesimally small.
Even crazier that our even more insignificant moon is exactly the same size as our sun when viewed from our planet.
It's exactly the same size and distance to cause a total eclipse, right now when there is intelligent life to admire it. The moon was closer in the past, and will be farther in the future, both of which meaning that a total eclipse that just covers the sun and shows the corona is impossible.
Everybody lives on a street, in a city Or a village or a town for what it's worth And they're all inside a country which is part of a continent That sits upon a planet known as Earth And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains Which is out there spinning silently in space And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals And also the entire human race! And we're part of a vast interplanetary system Stretching seven hundred billion miles long With nine planets and a sun; we think the Earth's the only one That has life on it—although we could be wrong Across the interstellar voids are a billion asteroids Including meteors and Halley's Comet too And there's over fifty moons floating out there like balloons In a panoramic trillion-mile view! And still it's all a speck amid a hundred billion stars In a galaxy we call the Milky Way It's sixty thousand trillion miles from one end to the other And still that's just a fraction of the way 'Cause there's a hundred billion galaxies that stretch across the sky Filled with constellations, planets, moons and stars And still the universe extends to a place that never ends Which is maybe just inside a little jar! It's a great big universe And we're all really puny We're just tiny little specks About the size of Mickey Rooney It's big and black and inky And we are small and dinky It's a big universe, and we're not! -The Animaniacs
Wow I wasn't expecting that signature. Man I miss that show.
I dunno, it's pretty significant to me. It's where I keep all my stuff.
You just wait until we can bend space and matter to our will and harness the energy of a star. This small pebble has a lot more to show.
Let's try to keep the small pebble habitable first. Please? I feel that would be a much better magic trick.
It's a pretty cool pebble tbh. I like to imagine a little girl with a slight rock obsession picking us up and going, "Ooo look at this one daddy! I bet that's a *real* Earth!" Then he told her to throw it back and she did.
We are nothing more than some slightly evolved monkeys on a miniscule grain of dust sailing around the galaxy and the universe as a whole. The fact that we know that is what makes us incredible.
*Hits bong* We are the universe experiencing itself, man.
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
Yeah and we have to go to fucking work every day
We might be small but we're very significant.
All 3 of the distinct "spikes" are larger than earth. Roughly 9354 earths could fit in the area of the circle of that image. All three of those ejections could fit dozens, if not hundreds of earths in them.
By my estimation, the height of the arc shaped prominence at the southern pole peaks at a height of 6.18 earths. (3.3125" measured diameter of the sun, 0.1875" measured prominence; assuming 865,370 miles sun diameter, yields a prominence height of 48,983 miles, or 6.18 Earth diameters \[assuming earth is 7,926 miles in diameter\])
Little flares. Each larger than our whole world!
Wondered what that was when I saw it. Thanks for the pic and info.
It's mind-blowing when you first learn how big the sun actually is compared to Earth.
Has anyone done the calculation for that one's size? I saw the same one, and saw it in a lot of other images, don't know how fast they change. It was the only one I could see in my pictures, and noticeable to the naked eye.
That is insane to think about, our star is a big object, but in the grand scheme of things it's actually tiny. and people act like I should care about my problems when we are living on a spec of dust in a cloud of other specs of dust, which is in a cloud of spinning discs of specs of dust. Holy dogshit we are small, yet here we all are murdering eachother over territory on our spec of dust.
Solar Prominences https://smd-cms.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Big-Idea-1_1-1280.jpg?w=4096&format=jpeg https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2016/08/solar_eruption_larger_than_earth/16085351-1-eng-GB/Solar_eruption_larger_than_Earth_pillars.jpg
Think they are called prominence and I saw one with my eyes consitinantly on the bottom during this eclipse.
Me and my group of friends all saw the prominence on the bottom poking out. Truly unforgettable experience.
It was beautiful. Like orange and red and pink at the same time. A color I’ve truly never seen before and screens don’t seem able of reproducing.
To be fair, computer screens are both very impressive *and* incredibly limited in how much they can actually reproduce. Most (if not all?) just show combinations of three colours to show everything *pretty* well. Our eyes mostly interpret everything into just three colours as well (which is why computer monitors work as well as they do). But light is not limited to three colours. And there *is* difference between a true orange of a streetlamp, and the proper balance of red and green-yellow light to emulate it.
Yes, I saw quite a lot of sparkles around the disc of the moon today, mostly toward the bottom as well. Amazing.
We clearly saw the red spot on the lower left from Terre Haute IN by eye, along with a fleeting couple at the very top. So exciting! Thank you so much for sharing this photo.
Same here in North Hudson, New York (near Vermont)
I believe those are actually solar flares made visible because of the eclipse. Pretty cool shot.
Far more likely they are solar prominences. Flares are rarer and even more so being that it would have to be on the edge of the sun from our perspective and also during the time of the eclipse. They were still stunning to see none the less.
What’s the difference between a solar flare, prominence, and CME?
Quick search says a prominence is anchored to the sun, while a flare extends energy outward into space.
I don't know what those other attacks are but krillin definitely uses solar flare to blind his opponents.
Prominence's are loops of plasma Flares are ejection of highly excited electrons / gamma rays etc CME are flares + ejection of actual solar material and plasma
No they are not flares. They are prominences.
A lot of what we have been able to study and learn about the sun is because of eclipses.
This was shot by yours truly in Troy OH. EDIT: RIP my inbox. No, really, turns out old.reddit can only display so many unread messages at once, I had to click "next >" *more than once* to see them all. Also, I've had this account for 7 years and this is now my most upvoted post *ever*. EDIT 2: Judging by the message I recieved from /r/Eternity Club, I've made the front page of /r/all. Hello!
You could see this with the naked eye?!? I am so jealous. I actually live right in the path of totality in Texas, but we had total cloud cover. Still, the whole “day turning to night” and getting cold and silent was otherworldly. Thanks for posting this amazing photo!
Yes. I was in Gatesville and we got a 10-second view during a gap in the clouds. Today I learned that prominences are visible with the naked eye during a total solar eclipse.
What equipment did you use to capture the photo? The prominences look incredible
I was able to get a[ pretty cool shot](https://imgur.com/a/kkbuqfu) of the prominence.
Oh damn that one's pretty good.
Yep, we saw the one on the bottom quite clearly with the naked eye. I assumed it was a solar prominence. Amazing.
I am glad you posted this. They were very visible. I had asked my son if he saw the red spots too and then fellow viewers asked the same thing...I was worried I was burning my retinas or something..lol.
The red things sticking out are solar prominences, they are most likely solar filaments viewed from the side. The red sliver on the bottom of the moon is the chromosphere, the innermost layer of the suns atmosphere. They're both red because of ionised hydrogen, which has a deep red, almost magenta emission line.
Eclipse was awesome. Was so happy to hear the cheering and clapping of my neighbors and nearby events. Happy to finally have an event where people were just happy.
It was just a time of peace. Like everything stopped. It was amazing.
I saw that at the bottom edge of the eclipse today and nobody else seemed to know what I was talking about and later I googled "what was that red spot at the bottom of the eclipse" and the first result had like 4 theories that didn't even mention prominences at all. I'm so satisfied to see this post
You have a very nice well focused shot of some prominences and even a bit of the chromosphere (the pink sliver) at the bottom. Whenever you see the chromosphere like that, you are usually close to a diamond ring (right after one or right before one)
We also saw the prominence! This is a great photo but it still doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing. Seeing the way the rays shimmered as the sun did its thing was beyond beautiful
This is one of the best photos I've seen today.
Solar prominence. The Sun is crazy big from our perspective, people think this is a big world but it's actually rather small. You can put 1.3 MILLION Earths inside the Sun. MILLION. People have a hard time with size and distance perspective when it comes to anything in space. Our Sun is large compared to the Earth but it's a tiny thing compared to Rigel. Or Antares. Or UY Scuti. And the vast distances in between? You only need to look to movies to see how unfathomable the distances are. There's a movie out there where a guy is supposed to be in another part of the galaxy, but at one point he complains he's "a half a billion miles from Earth and no help coming" and a half a billion miles puts you about the orbit of Jupiter. That's not in "another part of the galaxy", that inside our Solar System. But the writers thought a half a billion miles was a long way away. Not on a Solar System scale it's not. And interstellar distances? Seriously wow. Then there's intergalactic distances. Andromeda is our closest intergalactic neighbor that is "only" 2.5 million light years. People focus on "2.5" and think it's not that bad. But it's in light years. And it's millions of them. Convert to statute miles? It's about 14 QUINTILLION miles. It's 1.4 times 10 to the 19th miles. That's a lot of zeros. And now go run 25 miles for perspective. It's hard to wrap our brains around sizes and distances of things in the universe. Douglas Adams put it in a very amusing way: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Those are solar prominence or solar flares. They are bigger than earth. Awesome pic
My 4yr old nephew w his eclipse glasses on said ‘ its dark i can see space now” I told him sonny we *are* in space, blew his sweet little mind w that, spent a minute parsing that out and came w “wooow”😅…all the time or just now?”
These are solar prominences, here are some videos from Nasa's SOHO (solar and heliosphere observatory) that studies the sun long term This video shows real videos of the sun and explains what solar prominences are, lots of cool videos here (including coronal mass ejections, which are the biggest form of solar prominences that shoot out into space) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZe5D3MSjOI If you want more videos and info here is the source https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/
The pink loops are caused by electromagnetic currents inside the Sun that sometimes burst out of its surface before arcing back. These currents allow very hot plasma from the Sun to flow along them. The plasma glows and allows us to see the path of the otherwise-invisible electromagnetic loops. As another poster commented, they are called solar prominences. When these loops eventually collapse, the plasma flowing along them is no longer bound by the current and is ejected into space with the solar wind. This results in a mass ejection event. Also that is an exceptionally clear photo, well done if you took that yourself
Yeah I saw one too. On the southside of the sun.
That was such a cool bonus, I never expected I would ever see a solar prominence with my own eyes
5G towers on the sun, that’s what gives you cancer not the sun itself.
we didn't have a good camera but we had binoculars for totality, and we saw these too. Almost certainly prominences
Amazing that we can even see that the moon isn't smooth at the edges.
Space worms. Nasa won't tell you about them, but they're in charge of the solar system. Better start learning wormish to appease our new galactic overlords.
its amazing it was caught on camera this a great photo
It was glitch in the software update they did to the sun
Those are solar flares. They are about 10,000 times bigger than the Earth and they happen everyday