Stunning solar eclipse photos reveal giant hole and mysterious 'smoke rings' in the sun's atmosphere
Solar eclipse photography provides a unique vista into the processes taking place in the sun's upper atmosphere.
Newly released images from the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse reveal the sun's outer atmosphere in stunning detail. Researchers from the Solar Wind Sherpas project, coordinated by the University of Hawaii, present rare structures known as smoke rings and a giant coronal hole. The smoke rings, first observed in 2008, form due to temperature differences in the sun's coronal plasma and are spread along magnetic lines deep into interplanetary space.
Miloslav Druckmüller, a professor at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, explains that the images captured during this eclipse showcase these twisted vortices in remarkable detail. Alongside the smoke rings, the photographs reveal a colossal coronal hole, an opening in the sun's magnetic field lines that allows solar wind to escape at speeds up to 500 miles per second.
These structures persist for weeks or months and are visible as cooler regions in extreme ultraviolet and X-ray images. Druckmüller notes that the high-resolution images, taken from Pico Trigaza mountain in Spain, provide unprecedented insight into the sun's atmosphere, which remains elusive to space-based observatories. Space probes and ground-based telescopes utilize coronagraphs to study the corona, but during a total solar eclipse, the moon's alignment blocks the sun's bright disk, enabling researchers to observe the inner corona with exceptional clarity.
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