Transcripts of A New Look Inside the Sun.mov



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[Dean Pesnell] We need to understand the Sun, because the Sun changes our lives every day. We all know that the Sun makes the weather but when we're flying things in space, astronauts, satellites, the Sun affects them even more directly. The Sun puts out what we call space weather. Space weather causes problems with our satellites our astronauts, our communication systems here on Earth, and our navigation systems. We need to know more about how the Sun works where the magnetic field of the Sun comes from, and how that magnetic field is converted into space weather. HMI is the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager. Very long words for something that's very useful to look at on the Sun. The "helioseismic" refers to the sound waves that we can measure at the surface of the Sun, that when we carefully analyze them, we can look inside the Sun and see what's happening under the surface of the Sun, and even what's happening on the other side of the Sun. It's much like how we use the waves from earthquakes to know where the earthquake happened, how big it was, to learn about what's inside the Earth from earthquakes. At the same time HMI will produce maps of the magnetic field of the Sun. We're all familiar with the magnetic field of the Earth, we use our compasses to point our way with that. On the Sun, the magnetic field is much more complicated and it comes up as little tiny pieces of magnetic field all over the Sun. When they get together, they can be called "active regions", very strong magnetic fields but nonetheless there's a magnetic field all over the Sun. For many years people studied only the active regions, that was the thing that people really were worried about. We now understand that you have to worry about all of the magnetic field of the Sun, and that's what SDO was designed to do. 

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