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Unit 7: Astrophysics Page 60

Experiment: Recent Sun's photosphere has a

Astronomical Events temperature of over ten million
degrees Celsius.
Comet
Shoemaker
These flows occurred after violently
Levy Colliding
unstable magnetic reconnection
with Jupiter
events above the Sun produced the
flare. Many things about solar
Spectacular
active regions are not well
images of Jupiter
understood including the presence
during and after
of dark regions that appear to
impacts, when over twenty
move inward.
fragments of Comet Shoemaker-
Levy 9 smashed into the planet in
NASA's Deep Impact Mission
July 1994.

Launch and
Solar Flares caught by SOHO
flight teams are
in final
This mega-flare was seen being
preparations for
spewed out by the Sun, captured
the planned
by SOHO's Extreme ultraviolet
Jan. 12, 2005,
Imaging Telescope. Why does the
liftoff from Cape
Sun flare? Unpredictably, our Sun
Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., of
unleashes tremendous flares
NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft.
expelling hot gas into the Solar
The mission is designed for a six-
System that can affect satellites,
month, one-way, 431 million
astronauts, and power grids on
kilometer (268 million mile)
Earth.
voyage. Deep Impact will deploy a
probe that essentially will be "run
This close up of
over" by the nucleus of comet
an active region
Tempel 1 at approximately 37,000
on the Sun that
kilometers per hour (23,000 miles
produced a
per hour). It's like hitting a comet
powerful X-class
with something the size of a fridge.
flare was
captured by the orbiting TRACE
Galileo Probe Mission to Jupiter
satellite. The glowing gas flowing
around the relatively stable
Galileo was an unmanned
magnetic field loops above the
spacecraft sent by NASA to study

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