Clouds on the Sun?!
By Sam Kantrow on August 20, 2012, 10:45am
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Am I a weather geek? Yes! Do I like astronomy also...ya, kind of. To make a long story short, I follow NASA on twitter, and every day they tweet out some cool pictures. This "astronomy photo of the day" was both astronomical and meteorological in nature, so here it is. It looks like a cloud on the surface of the sun. Is it? Yes!
It's not a "normal cloud" that you would see on earth. After all, the suns surface is WAY to hot to have a normal cold cloud like we have. This clouds is actually a solar filament and is composed of charged hydrogen gas. It's held in the air by the suns magnetic field. The picture above was captured near the active solar region AR 1535 a few weeks ago using a color-inverted image.
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