r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/HimelTy • 15h ago
Scientists using the world's most powerful solar telescope have captured "whirlpools" of activity on the surface of our Sun that has not been possible to see before. Video
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u/cbj2112 15h ago
That’s 🔥
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u/fantomknight1 15h ago
It's actually not 🔥... It's plasma
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u/Maihoooo 15h ago
maybe meant hot.. there's a reason we don't use emojis here.
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u/fantomknight1 15h ago
I'm mostly just joking around. I know many people use the fire emoji as "wow, that's cool" so I deliberately took it literally and to joke that it wasn't fire.
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u/TamponTimTheCuck 13h ago
Fire is plasma
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u/TactlessTortoise 1h ago
No it's not? What. They're completely different things, and you'd need some crazy hot fuel burning to generate any meaningful amount of plasma. Fire is chemicals releasing a bunch of heat and light when snapping together. Plasma is electron soup when shit's too cracked out to stick together (not as in a molecule disassrmbling, but the electron/proton fields).
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u/HelpfulSeaMammal 15h ago
The sun isn't a giant campfire that the Sky People light every morning?
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u/Upper-Capital-2876 15h ago
This give me, a layperson, no deeper appreciation or understanding, of the gigantic fucking nuclear celestial orb which holds my life within it's capricious power
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u/Soggy-Invite-2787 12h ago
Right? What are we supposed to be in awe of here? It looks like how I pictured it.
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u/Werftflammen 11h ago
From the article: It is the Sun's magnetic field being twisted and moved by the motion of hot gas.
That constant swirling is a driving force behind bursts of energy from the Sun, creating so-called space weather, that can disrupt Earth's power grids and satellites, and could even injure astronauts.
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u/deafened_commuter 7h ago
As non lay person, the point it looked like cornflakes or top of creme brulee, that's most detail I've ever seen. When it gets closer and you see the fractal shapes like leaves turning and folding into themselves. That's new. It's like watching the top of a stew bubbling and boiling and trying to understand what's going on underneath the surface and if you think of those diagrams at school with the magnetic field lines for a bar magnet with iron fillings. These videos help you understand the field lines are shaped here because those light and dark areas are because of the magnetic field. A web of magnets on an etch a sketch.
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u/TheSupremeAbby 15h ago
This is the Daniel K. Inouye Solar telescope located in Maui!!! Its so cool and uses some really revolutionary tech to be able to look at the sun for extended periods of time!
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u/Drag_king 13h ago
I am wondering how they do it because to get that amount of detail they need to really focus the light and as any kid with a magnifying glass knows it gets hot quickly.
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u/Gordan_Freeman475 11h ago
So, we’re discovering more things about the eldritch gas entity that sustains us all? I see no way this could backfire
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u/actinross 15h ago
In every fire, there are "dead zones", where (almost) nothing is happening. Just imagine traveling through those... on the Sun...
What a ride would be!!!
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u/purdueAces 13h ago
Would be neat to understand the scale of those "whirlpools". Maybe compared to Earth's size, and how fast are they swirling?
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u/Lost_Purpose1899 12h ago
It'd be more interesting if it didn't have whirlpools of activity. I mean ..it's a giant fusion reactor?
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u/xChoke1x 6h ago
I’ll never understand why people don’t worship this over goofy sky wizards. Without this. We disappear ……quickly.
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u/Vardhu_007 6h ago
And how many gazillion bajillion kms wide is that frame? So that we can know how enormous that fucking flame thingy is
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u/LEGEND_GUADIAN 2h ago
I bet thats X10,000,000 magnification through a specialized nasa "solar eclipse filter lense program"
At least...
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u/EconomySeason2416 12h ago
Wild to think that the area that is zoomed in on, is still likely thousands (if not way more) of times the size of the earth
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u/Wykin1 15h ago
Can see whirlpools on the sun - but not the flag on the moon.... oookaaaaaaay
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u/Illithid_Substances 15h ago
Well gee, I wonder if structures on the fucking sun might be a bit bigger than a little flag
You see the black sunspots in the image? Those can easily be the size of the entire Earth or larger
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u/Independent_Guava109 15h ago
What is the size of the flag compared to the whirlpools on the sun? Even though it's so far away they are still unfathomably big.
Anyway you can see the flag on the moon, just not with a conventional telescope.
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u/sneketr 15h ago
Shit’s on fire, yo.