Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory Reveals Giant Plasma Flows on Sun

Forty-five years ago, back in 1968, two solar researchers George Simon and Nigel Weiss suggested that there ought to be these big giant cell flows on the sun. In 1975, just a few years after that, I was a summer intern at what was then called Sacramento Peak Observatory in Sunspot New Mexico and my advisor that summer was George Simon. So I show up at the beginning of the summer and George says “Let’s go look for giant cells.” Unfortunately, we didn’t have the data at the time so we, I spent much of the summer trying to figure out what they were and how we might try to find them. Over the years, I’ve developed techniques for trying to pull them out of the data, and the problem is these are really slow flows compared to everything else on the surface of the sun, normally 10-20 miles an hour when things are going around thousands of miles an hour. So they’re very difficult to see. Come ahead to this summer, I had a summer intern this summer. Owen Coldgrove shows up and my student Lisa Upton and I tell Owen “Let’s go look for giant cells.” So we spent the summer doing just that. The first half of the summer, unsuccessfully. We tried a technique that I had literally spent decades developing and it really didn’t work. So we tried another technique and first time, Owen came up to my office after running the programs over the night and when we looked at the data and we figured nah, this is it, we got it. We could see these big flow patterns on the surface of the sun that were persisting for months so we knew at that point, no we’ve got this. After 45 years of many people looking for it we finally found them. It was incredibly exciting to find these features on the sun. When we first found them, Owen and Dave and I were sitting in Dave’s office and we were looking at the latest set of data that we had run the analysis on, and when the picture popped up on the screen, we knew immediately exactly what we had found and it was high-fives all around. It was just such a thrilling experience to find these features that had been sought after for such a long time. One hope is that by tracing these flows and seeing how they’re related to the emergence of sunspots, that we may get a better handle on that, predicting sunspots. But we know, just from how other flows move magnetic fields around on the surface of the sun, that these flows will do that as well, and that influences the sunspot cycle: how big the next cycle’s going to be, it influences the structure of the magnetic field throughout the solar system, that it comes off of the sun with the solar wind and influences how it impacts the Earth, how it impacts our satellites in space and produces what we call space weather.