* Astronomy

A new movie from the Japanese Hinode spacecraft is one of the most detailed glimpses of a solar flare ever made and has helped scientists see what's behind the colossal eruption.
The striking video, released this week, shows a major flare that lifted off the Sun on Dec. 13, 2006. The flare erupted from a sunspot catalogued as No. 930.

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The Hinode spacecraft captures one of the most detailed videos ever of a sun storm.
Credit: NASA/Hinode

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 17:39, 2007-04-26

Hinode, the newest solar observatory on the space scene, has obtained never-before-seen images showing that the sun's magnetic field is much more turbulent and dynamic than previously known.

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The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun's chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode.
The observatory will have as dramatic an impact on our understanding of the Sun as the Hubble Space Telescope has had on our view of the universe beyond, scientists told a NASA press conference in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday.

"Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date. We've seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success" - Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

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Instruments aboard a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency satellite named Hinode, or "Sunrise," are returning extraordinary new images of our sun. The international mission to study the forces that drive the violent, explosive power of the sun launched from Japan in September.
Hinode is circling Earth in a polar flight path (a "sun-synchronous" orbit) that allows the spacecraft's instruments to remain in continuous sunlight for nine months each year. An international team of scientists and engineers is performing the calibration and checkout of Hinode's three primary instruments: the Solar Optical Telescope, the X-ray Telescope and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer. NASA made significant contributions to the development of these scientific instruments.

"The checkout phase is crucial because it allows controllers to confirm the spacecraft's instruments are working properly. As part of this checkout, we've been treated to some remarkable images of the sun" - John M. Davis, NASA project scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Centre, Huntsville, Alabama.

Hinode's X-ray Telescope has captured unprecedented details in solar active region corona, the sun's outer atmosphere. The corona is the spawning ground for explosive solar activity, such as coronal mass ejections. Powered by the sun's magnetic field, these violent atmospheric disturbances of the sun can be of danger to space travelers, disruptive to orbiting satellites and can cause power grid problems on Earth.
Hinode's Solar Optical Telescope has delivered images that show greatly magnified views of the sun's surface. These images are revealing new details about solar convection. Solar convection is the process that drives the rising and falling of gases in the lowest atmospheric region, the photosphere. In addition, the Solar Optical Telescope is the first space-borne instrument to measure the strength and direction of the sun's magnetic field.
The Solar Optical Telescope images and magnetic maps uncover highly dynamic, intermittent nature of the sun's lower atmosphere - chromosphere. It is also providing revolutionary views on various solar phenomena from heating of solar atmosphere to generation of magnetic fields and magnetic reconnection.

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