Warming yourself at the oven
Credit: TRACE Project, Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research, NASA
Explanation: Is this our Sun? Yes. Even on a normal day, our Sun is sizzling ball of seething hot gas. Unpredictably, regions of strong and tangled magnetic fields arise, causing sunspots and bright active regions. The Sun’s surface bubbles as hot hydrogen gas streams along looping magnetic fields. These active regions channel gas along magnetic loops, usually falling back but sometimes escaping into the solar corona or out into space as the solar wind. Pictured above is our Sun in three colors of ultraviolet light. Since only active regions emit significant amounts of energetic ultraviolet light, most of the Sun appears dark. The colorful portions glow spectacularly, pinpointing the Sun’s hottest and most violent regions. Although the Sun is constantly changing, the rate of visible light it emits has been relatively stable over the past five billion years, allowing life to emerge on Earth.
Thanks to Jenna for the link.
This reminds me of a quote from Aristotle’s Biology (specifically, the Parts of Animals):
"For in all natural things there is something marvelous. Even as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to those strangers who wished to meet him but stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself at the oven—he bade them to enter without fear, ‘For there are gods here too’—so too one should approach research about each of the animals without disgust, since in every one there is something natural and good."
I learned in Allan Gotthelf’s lecture on Aristotle as Scientist: A Proper Verdict, that "warming yourself at the oven" was probably a Greek euphemism for, shall we say, sitting on the can.
Just another big hot ball of gas, worthy of study.
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