Solar Dynamics Observatory

We already passed around 40 satellites orbiting Earth studying the sun, and now we're speeding past a very special one.

This is the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

It's snapping pictures of the sun in all these different wavelengths.

It's one of the biggest data sets that we have at NASA, and it's frankly the beating heart of watching the sun every day and its activity and its changes.

In late 2024, Kravova and colleagues were able to show that super flares occur roughly once a century on stars that resemble our sun in key characteristics, such as similar metallicity, luminosity, and mass.

So the authors analyzed data collected by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft between 2010 and 2016.

They correlated the amount of energy released by the 300 strongest solar flares during this period and compared that with the size of the corresponding active region the flares came from on the sun's visible surface.

Active regions are areas on the sun's surface where the magnetic field is especially strong and complex in structure.

Its main objective is to investigate the physics behind how the sun works.

And the Solar Dynamics Observatory can observe the sun twenty-four hours a day.

SOHO, for instance, sits almost one million miles from us, and closer to the sun, too.

Okay, it's still, like, ninety-two million miles from the sun, but SOHO has been watching the sun steadily since its launch in 1995, making it one of the longest-lasting missions ever.

You'll go blind.

So yeah, don't stare at the sun.

Instead, check out all the cool solar observatories websites, browse SOHO, STEREO, Solar Dynamics Observatory, and of course, the Parker Solar Probe.

We'll link to them in the show notes, too.