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A backside filament eruption


A quite impressive filament eruption took place on the Sun's backside on 11 September (see this movie). Solar filaments are clouds of ionized gas above the solar surface squeezed between magnetic regions of opposite polarity. Being cooler and denser than the plasma underneath and their surroundings, they appear as dark lines when seen on the solar disk using special filters.

A filament seen in profile


Solar filaments are clouds of ionized gas above the solar surface squeezed between magnetic regions of opposite polarity. Being cooler and denser than the plasma underneath and their surroundings, they appear as dark lines when seen on the solar disk using special filters, such as Hydrogen-alpha that shows the "cold" inner atmosphere of the Sun ("chromosphere").

Prominences do the twist


Filaments in the southern solar hemisphere


The Sun's polar field reversals


A warned person is worth two - a particle storm alert by COMESEP

A proton storm in space

Prominences do the catwalk


The month of July saw some really great prominence activity. Prominences are relatively cool and dense structures reaching all the way up into the Sun's hot outer atmosphere. This movie shows nine events picked from a long list.

Coronal hole XL


Itchy satellites


Most often, people think about high energetic protons, space debris and altitude loss from an expanding atmosphere as the most important threats to the survival of earth-orbiting satellites. However, also the abundantly present electrons can constitute a lethal danger to the satellite's life. Many satellites such as Telstar 401 and Galaxy IV did not recover from electron induced effects, so two of them will be sketched here.

Where's my donut?


The plasmasphere is a region of "cold" (low-energetic) particles that extends from about 1600 km to over 30000 km above Earth's surface. It is an extension of the ionosphere, and overlaps the inner Van Allen radiation belt and a good part of the outer one. The difference between the plasmasphere and the Van Allen belts is that the latter contain "hot" (high-energetic) particles that behave according to a whole different set of rules.

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