This is the most detailed movie ever recorded the Sun's 5500°C surface. Those shapes you can see here, called granules, are convection cells of solar plasma. Hot plasma wells up from below, cools, and sinks. The Sun's entire surface is constantly turbulently roiling like this.
Solar granules have an average diameter of around 1000 km, so most of these are larger than France!
Credit: National Solar Observatory/AURA/NSF
@InvaderXan, that’s really cool...... awesome would probably be more appropriate.
@InvaderXan Thanks for sharing! 😀 It was a good reminder of how incredibly big our star is (compared to Earth, that is 😅)! 🌞
@MartinShadok By our standards, it totally is! Like, 99.8% of the entire solar system is just the Sun. We're just living on the random dust which was left behind after it formed!
@InvaderXan Surely we'd at least count as sand!
@InvaderXan what's the timescale on this? Is it real time?
@InvaderXan nvm. I just saw the timestamp in the corner of the video in the Twitter link. Looks like it's sped up maybe 60-100x, but at the physical scale it's showing, that's still moving extremely quickly!!
@nat Yeah, slower than shown here, but surprisingly fast for something that size!
:)
@InvaderXan forbidden popcorn
food
@InvaderXan yum baked beans
This was recorded using the Inouye Solar Telescope. A better quality version of the video can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/NSF/status/1222609934698893312