"We've never seen anything quite like it," says solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters.
Last
week she sat in an audience of nearly two hundred colleagues at the
"Living with a Star" workshop in Boulder, Colorado, and watched in
amazement as Saku Tsuneta of Japan played a movie of sunspot 10926
breaking through the turbulent surface of the sun. Before their very
eyes an object as big as a planet materialized, and no one was prepared
for the form it took.
"It
looks like a prehistoric trilobite," said Marc De Rosa, a scientist
from Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto,
Calif. "To me it seemed more like cellular mitosis in which duplicated
chromosomes self-assemble into two daughter cells," countered
Guhathakurta.
Click here
and decide for yourself. (From beginning to end, the movie spans 6
days. The "trilobite" centered above is about the size of Earth.)
"This
movie is a magnetogram—a dynamic map tracing the sunspot's intense
magnetism," Guhathakurta explains. "Black represents negative (S)
polarity, and white represents positive (N)."
The
data were gathered by the Japanese Space Agency's Hinode spacecraft,
launched in Sept. 2006 on a mission to study sunspots and solar storms.
"This is the highest resolution magnetogram ever taken from space,"
says Tsuneta, Hinode's chief scientist at the National Astronomical
Observatory of Japan in Tokyo. "It's showing us things we've never seen
before." - from Corpus Mmothra
