Lab Exercise 7 An Incident On the Sun

Here Comes The Sun

Read Laboratory Exercise 7 section 7.4a and answer questions 25.

Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) are massive clouds of hot gas that are ejected by the sun. Sometimes CMEs are directed towards us, and sometimes they are directed away from us depending on the orientation of the flare that produced them. These are LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph) images onboard the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) .

Figure 7.21 Below are examples of CMEs at different orientations.


Eastward CME	Earthward CME	Westward CME

Figure 7.22 SOHO/LASCO coronagraph showing extremely violent coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Please note the CMEs of July 16, 18 and 20, 2002. The two bright star approaching the sun from the East and West are Jupiter and Mars. They are not going to crash into the sun: they are going to go behind it.

CME movie

Home The Sunny July of 2002