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Cascading Post-coronal Loops

April 24, 2017
An active region that had just rotated into NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory's view blasted out a coronal mass ejection, which was immediately followed by a bright series of post-coronal loops seeking to reorganize that region's magnetic field.

An active region that had just rotated into view blasted out a coronal mass ejection, which was immediately followed by a bright series of post-coronal loops seeking to reorganize that region's magnetic field (April 19, 2017). We have observed this phenomenon numerous times, but this one was one of the longest and clearest sequences we have seen in years. The bright loops are actually charged particles spinning along the magnetic field lines. The action was captured in a combination of two wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light over a period of about 20 hours.

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PIA21598_Cascading_combo_big.mp4
PIA21598_Cascading_combo_sm.mp4

SDO is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Its Atmosphere Imaging Assembly was built by the Lockheed Martin Solar Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL), Palo Alto, California.

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