Everything Space Related

From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Although craters and other formations appear to be permanent, the moon wasn’t always this way. With the help of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can now see more of the moon’s past.

In 2012, the sun unleashed a series of explosive events that were captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The eruption began with a solar flare on the lower right limb of the sun, followed by a coronal mass ejection that launched into space. The sun also provided a stunning magnetic display known as coronal rain, where the corona's hot plasma cooled and condensed due to the area's strong magnetic fields. This plasma acted as a tracer, allowing researchers to observe the magnetic field dance on the sun and trace the fields as they gradually returned to the solar surface. The footage was captured by the AIA instrument on the Solar Dynamics Observatory and each second in the video represents 6 minutes of actual time.