Features
Many interesting phenomena can be observed in the chromosphere:
- Filaments (and prominences, which are filaments viewed from the side) underlie many coronal mass ejections and hence are important to the prediction of space weather. Solar prominences rise up through the chromosphere from the photosphere, sometimes reaching altitudes of 150,000 km. These gigantic plumes of gas are the most spectacular of solar phenomena, aside from the less frequent solar flares.
- The most common feature is the presence of spicules, long thin fingers of luminous gas which appear like the blades of a huge field of fiery grass growing upwards from the photosphere below. Spicules rise to the top of the chromosphere and then sink back down again over the course of about 10 minutes. Similarly, there are horizontal wisps of gas called fibrils, which last about twice as long as spicules.
See the flash spectrum of the solar chromosphere (Eclipse of March 7, 1970).
Read more about this topic: Chromosphere
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)