A Filament, Hovering in the Sun's Atmosphere (IMAGE)

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

A Filament, Hovering in the Sun's Atmosphere

Caption

This is a simulation of a cross-section of a thread of solar material, called a filament, hovering in the sun's atmosphere. The yellow area is the thread itself, where the material is denser, and the black area is the surrounding, less dense material. The characteristic wave motion leads to complex turbulence around the edges of the yellow thread, which heats the surrounding black material. This model was created with the Aterui supercomputer at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Credit

Credits: NAOJ/Patrick Antolin

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