Wednesday's Solar Eclipse and some Sun facts

Wednesday, 14th November, is the solar eclipse.  I am hoping to go out early morning at the Perth Observatory to view it, however the chances are slim as it will only be somewhat viewable here in Perth for about 30 minutes depending just after sunrise.

So, I thought id post some cool facts that I know about the Sun as kind of a celebration for the eclipse.
I have already blogged a detailed summary of the making and death of stars, but here are just a few more cool things I know about that amazing, life giving star in the sky.

Solar storms; Coronal Mass Ejections, or CMEs for short, can hurl more than 100 billion tons of mass into deep space at speeds millions of kilometers an hour.  The ejected mass is in the form of subatomic particles.  When these reach the Earth, they interact with the planets upper atmosphere and magnetic field.... the spectacular lights of the aurora borealis.

Solar Prominences; Vast curling clouds of relatively cool plasma can easily been seen through a telescope with a suitably dense filter to shut out the glare.  Unlike CMEs, these visually dramatic prominences are usually confined within the Sun's atmosphere, the corona.

Sunspots; The photosphere is the obviously bright surface of the Sun.  It is often dappled with sunspots, created when huge and powerful loops within the Sun's magnetic field force their way through the photosphere.

Solar Grains; Granulation is caused by convection currents inside the Sun.  Hot material rises into the photosphere, then cools down (cooled for the Sun anyway) and falls back around the edges of each cell.  Think Lava lamp.

Jets on the Sun; Imagine a pipe as wide as say, Arizona, and as tall as the Earth from pole to pole.  Now imagine this pipe filled with hot gas moving 50,000km per mile.  Think of the pipe made not from any solid materials by just by a transparent magnetic field.  This is a spicule, one of thousands constantly generated by the Sun.  They last for around 5 minutes and then fade.

and finally - The Eclipse; A solar eclipse occurs when the moon interposes itself between the Sun and the Earth, temporarily obscuring our view of the Sun.  By a lucky coincidence, the Moon's disc neatly superimposes over the Sun's disc during a full eclipse, leaving just the corona visible.  This is a perfect time for scientists to observe the Sun.

Well, there we go, some pretty cool facts about our star, its work googling some of these as the pictures are amazing..... Wish me luck for Wednesday :)