(astronomy) Sheets of luminous gas emanating from the sun's surface; they appear dark against the sun's disk but bright against the dark sky, and occur only in regions of horizontal magnetic fields.
Solar prominence
| Sci-Tech Dictionary: solar prominence |
(′sō·lər ′präm·ə·nəns)
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: solar prominence |
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| WordNet: solar prominence |
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The noun has one meaning:
Meaning #1:
large eruptions of luminous hydrogen gas that rise thousands of kilometers above the chromosphere
| Wikipedia: Solar prominence |
A prominence is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface, often in a loop shape. Prominences are anchored to the Sun's surface in the photosphere, and extend outwards into the Sun's corona. While the corona consists of extremely hot ionized gases, known as plasma, which do not emit much visible light, prominences contain much cooler plasma, similar in composition to that of the chromosphere. A prominence forms over timescales of about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months. Some prominences break apart and give rise to coronal mass ejections.
A typical prominence extends over many thousands of kilometers; the largest observed by SOHO was seen in 1997 and was some 350,000 km (216,000 miles) long [1] - some 28 times the diameter of the Earth. The mass contained within a prominence is typically of the order of 100 billion tonnes of material.
If a prominence occurs on the disc of the sun it appears darker than its background (due to the lower temperature of the plasma). These are referred to as 'solar filaments.
Image gallery
 Solar prominence. |
 Detached Solar prominence. |
 A limb's flare and after-flare prominence. |
 Major eruptive prominence (Skylab 1973). |
 Solar prominence STEREO behind. |
 Solar prominence STEREO ahead. |
References
- ^ "EIT gallery". http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/EIT/eit024.html. Retrieved 2005-10-15.
- Galsgaard, K.; Longbottom, A.W. (1999). "Formation of solar prominences by flux convergence". Astrophysical Journal 510: 444. doi:.
- Low, B.C.; Fong, B.; Fan, Y. (2003). "The mass of a solar quiescent prominence". Astrophysical Journal 594: 1060. doi:.
- Golub, L.; Pasachoff J.M. (1997). The Solar Corona. Cambridge University Press.
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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