A Triangular Prominence

Our Sun is a maelstrom of light and heat, a constant battlefield for plasma and magnetic fields. This recent prominence, captured by Andrea Vanoni and others, bore a striking triangular shape.  (Image credit: A. Vanoni; via APOD) Read the full article

The Solar Corona in Detail

The sun's corona -- its outer atmosphere -- is usually impossible to see, since it's far outshone by the rest of the sun. But during a total solar eclipse, the moon blocks out all but the vibrant, wispy corona. (Image credit: P. Hart; via APOD) Read the full article

A Shallow Origin for the Sun's Magnetic Field

The Sun's complex magnetic field drives its 11-year solar activity cycle in ways we have yet to understand. During active periods, more sunspots appear, along with roiling flows within the Sun that scientists track through helioseismology.  (Image credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/LMSAL; research credit: G. Vasil et al.; via Physics World) Read the full article

The Solar Corona in Stunning Detail

The ESA's Solar Orbiter captured this beautifully detailed video of our sun's corona last September. The Solar Orbiter took this footage from about 43 million kilometers away, a third of the distance between the sun and the Earth.  (Video and image credit: ESA; via Colossal) Read the full article

Kelvin-Helmholtz and the Sun

Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) are a favorite among fluid dynamicists. They resemble the curls of a breaking ocean wave -- not a coincidence, since KHI create those ocean waves to begin with -- and show up in picturesque clouds, Martian lava coils, and Jovian cloud bands. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/NRL/Guillermo Stenborg and Evangelos Paouris; research credit: E. Paouris et al.; via Gizmodo) Read the full article

Coronal Heating

Compared to its interior, the surface of our sun is a cool 6,000 degrees Celsius. But beyond the surface, the sun's corona heats up dramatically through interactions between plasma and strong magnetic fields.  (Image credit: NASA SDO; research credit: F. Stefani et al.; via Physics World) Read the full article

"One Month of Sun"

Get lost in the beauty of our star with Seán Doran's film "One Month of Sun". Constructed from more than 78,000 NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory images, the video shows solar activity from August 2014. (Image and video credit: S. Doran, using NASA SDO data; via Colossal) Read the full article

"Fire and Fusion"

Photographer Andrew McCarthy constructed a spectacular 300-megapixel image of our sun by compositing thousands of individual images. Sunspots, coronal mass ejections, and feathery convective swirls abound.  (Image credit: A. McCarthy; via Colossal) Read the full article

Eyes on the Sun

Though it may look like the Eye of Sauron, this image is actually one of our best-ever glimpses of a sunspot. Captured by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, this sunspot is larger than our entire planet, yet we can see details as small as 20km across. (Image credit: NSO/AURA/NSF; via Bad Astronomer; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh) Read the full article

Catching rare solar neutrinos took an impressive fluid dynamical feat. (Image credit: NASA SDO; via Nature; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

As part of its shakedown, the new Inouye Solar Telescope has captured the surface of the sun in stunning new detail. Seen here are some of the sun's turbulent convection cells, each about the size of the state of Texas. (Image and video credit: Inouye Solar Telescope)

Joe Hanson over at "It's Okay to Be Smart" has a great video on the random walk photons have to make to escape the core of the sun and other stars, but it’s missing a key ingredient: convection!  (Video and image credit: It's Okay to Be Smart)

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections send out shock waves that reverberate through our solar system. But shock waves through plasma -- the ionized, high-energy particles making up the solar wind -- do not behave like our typical terrestrial ones. Instead of traveling through collisions between particles, these astrophysical shock waves are driven by interactions between moving, charged particles and magnetic fields. 

A driving burst of plasma accelerated into ambient plasma creates electromagnetic forces that accelerate ambient ions to supersonic speeds, pushing the shock wave onward even without particles directly colliding. Thus far, piecing together the physics of these interactions has been a challenge because spacecraft are limited in what and where they can measure. But a group here on Earth has now recreated and observed some of this process in the lab. (Image credit: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory; research credit: D. Schaeffer et al.; via phys.org)