Sun Points to the Right

NASA released an unusual image of the sun showing pair of giant filaments on the face of the sun that form an arrow pointing to the right. An early prediction of the 2016 Presidential election?

Scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center spotted on the sun an unusual pattern. A pair of giant filaments on the face of the sun have formed what appears to be an enormous arrow pointing to the right. Is the sun already predicting the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election?

Somebody will sure make a connection of the right arrow on the sun spotted on /4/28, 2015.

NASA says if straightened out, each filament would be about as long as the sun’s diameter, 1 million miles long. Filaments are cooler clouds of solar material suspended above the sun’s surface by powerful magnetic forces.

Filaments can float for days without much change, though they can also erupt, releasing solar material in a shower that either rains back down or escapes out into space, becoming a moving cloud known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME. NASA took the image with combined wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observes the sun 24 hours a day.

The sun is also featured in an incredible video made with data from the SDO Spacecraft over four years. Michael Koenig edited time lapse sequences of the sun’s atmosphere observed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft between 2011 and 2015.

This montage features excerpts of 4K full-disk pictures in extreme ultraviolet channels, mainly using wavelengths of 30.4 nm (50,000 Kelvin) partially in combination with 17.1 nm (6.3×105 Kelvin), and offers a glance at spicules, solar flares, filaments and an overview of the sun’s atmosphere.