TORONTO – NASA has released a video of a huge solar eruption captured by its newest space telescope.
The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), is a mission designed to observe how material on the sun moves, gathers energy, and then heats up as it travels through a little-understood region of the sun’s lower atmosphere.
READ MORE:New satellite offers first glimpse of sun’s mysterious atmosphere
On May 9, IRIS observed a coronal mass ejection (CME) in fantastic detail. The solar material erupts at speeds of up to more than 2 million kilometres per hour. A CME is a release of plasma and particles. Often they can trigger solar storms here on Earth once the matter interacts with our magnetosphere.
The line that appears in the video is the entrance slit for IRIS’s spectrograph which allows it to split light into its different wavelengths. This gives scientists the opportunity to measure various aspects of the sun, including temperature, speed and density of the solar material.
To get a better understanding on how large the sun is as well as its eruptions, the field of view here is about five Earths wide and seven-and-a-half Earths tall.
IRIS was launched in June 2013.
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