It’s going to be 83° today in #SonomaValley! Sharing a new development on Tracking Waves from Sunspots from @nasa … While it often seems unvarying from our viewpoint on Earth, the sun is constantly changing. Material courses through not only the star itself, but throughout its expansive atmosphere. Understanding the dance of this charged gas is a key part of better understanding our sun – how it heats up its atmosphere, how it creates a steady flow of solar wind streaming outward in all directions, and how magnetic fields twist and turn to create regions that can explode in giant eruptions. Now, for the first time, researchers have tracked a particular kind of solar wave as it swept upward from the sun’s surface through its atmosphere, adding to our understanding of how solar material travels throughout the sun. Scientists used data from our Solar Dynamics Observatory, our Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, and the Big Bear Solar Observatory to track a solar wave as it channeled upwards from the sun’s surface into the atmosphere. Credits: Zhao et al/NASA/SDO/IRIS/BBSO #sun #solar #astronomy #earth #space #science #SonomaValleyWine #TheRootsRunDeep #sunshine