Image of the day: The Sun’s magnetic field

Life in the visible light spectrum is sometimes drab, lacking the extreme color and detail available to its compatriots in the other spectrums. Take the Sun’s magnetic field for instance; it’s completely invisible in the visible light spectrum (that’s quite a bit of “visible[s]” in one sentence).

NASA’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recently produced an image made by superimposing images snapped every 10 seconds of 10 wavelengths of the Sun’s coronal loops over a sunspot group.

To make a bit of sense of the image, bear in the mind that the white strands are examples of coronal loops, or lines from the Sun’s magnetic field passing through the sun’s outer gas layer called the corona. The blue and yellow represent opposite polarities of the magnetic fields as were measured by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, two instruments aboard the SDO. Although recently combined, the images were actually snapped on October 24, 2014 at 23:50 UT.

Source: NASA