What does the Sun's surface look like close up?, page 1
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reply posted on 10-2-2006 @ 11:18 AM by deltaboy
Originally posted by ahnikah
You might want to look here. There are many closer-up pictures of the sun's surface in different spectrums....

sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov...

and the following might help as well

sci.esa.int...


Thanks for the links, but I still want a really really true close up of the Sun. Like an actual image of showing the surface. Kind of like you see Earth from millions of miles away that shows mostly blue, but you want to see the surface from 10 feet away.



reply posted on 10-2-2006 @ 12:15 PM by sensfan
Here's a few.







Looks like a bubbling cauldrin of lava. Very cool.


reply posted on 10-2-2006 @ 01:58 PM by deltaboy
Originally posted by sensfan
Here's a few.







Looks like a bubbling cauldrin of lava. Very cool.


Thats better. Thank you very much. Now there is something that helps answer my curiousity about the surface of the sun. As well as most or all stars I believe.



reply posted on 10-2-2006 @ 06:17 PM by Yarium
Well, during my half-year university course on cosmology, we studied the Sun. The close-up of the "bubbling" surface of the Sun is the best one in this thread. Every bubble is called a granule.

Basically, it's like boiling water. You have the same kind of heat-transfers, but with the added strangeness that plasma and magnetic fields bring (plasma - being what the sun is "made" of - is affected by magnetic fields, and so adds a new depth to the "environment" of the sun that isn't fully understood). The heat from within escapes along convection currents. This creates the bubble-like granule.

Really the surface is in constant motion, and is constantly changing, and it looks crazy cool. Essentially, though, it's like watching the craziest pot of boiling water that you've ever seen.

And remember, the Sun isn't really a gas - it's a plasma. The atoms of stripped of their electrons because of the intense heat. The sun itself is condensed plasma - and so functions like a liquid. So, if you didn't die/vapourize/melt, you could "swim" on the surface of the Sun.

Of course, gravity would pull you down, and you'd then be crushed by the crazy pressures. It's not like you can be bouyant in it.

The real question is, what's the core like? Is it a semi-plasma-solid? Is it like the surface of the sun? I think that's a more interesting question, but, like trying to observe the surface of the Earth's core, is likely one that we won't really be figuring out any time soon.


reply posted on 26-2-2006 @ 09:51 AM by Toadmund

Ohhh, they're real!

That first pic that E_T posted looks like a devil-angel or something.

That SOHO site is really cool, you can download a sun screensaver there that updates itself.


reply posted on 26-2-2006 @ 01:37 PM by Saltman
Here's a few more to add to the mix, including some high-res downloads:

www.space.com...

It's important to note that even these high-res images only show details to about the 100km scale, so unless the sun's features are fractal-like, we really don't know what the surface of the sun looks like in close-up, "standing on the surface" scale.


In fact, no one knows what is the lower limit of discernable structures on the solar surface. Eventually, he said, larger telescopes with adaptive optics might be able to see structures as small as 0.6 miles (1 kilometer).



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