Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO/Steele Hill

NASA’s SDO Watches Magnetic Arches Tower Over Sun’s Surface

Massive arches of solar material brighten and stream over an active region on the sun’s surface in this animation of imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, on Sept. 29, 2016. Active regions are areas of particularly strong and complex magnetic fields. Charged solar particles travel along and illuminate the magnetic field lines above this region. The Earth is inset in the video for scale. SDO captured this video in a type of light that is invisible to human eyes, called extreme ultraviolet light. The imagery is colorized here in gold.

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By Steele Hill and Lina Tran
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

Last Updated: Oct. 5, 2016

Editor: Rob Garner