spheres in Sun's corona

[larryduane100]

I saw this youtube today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8POHkMQg0Dw
Several spheres, maybe as large as Earth, are seen in the corona of the Sun. Could z-pinching be going on?
The date of the sightings is Jan 21, 2010.
larryduane100

[junglelord]

Weird, they do not look like plasma, so either its an artifact, or its real.

[mharratsc]

Do you suppose that the Sun has little 'mini-parturition events' still? Maybe during big CME's? o.O

Just thinking out loud. I have no other logical idea what those things could be, other than a Photoshop job. :\

[StevenJay]

The source that the Tuber gives is GLP (god like productions), a well-known disinfo site, so. . .

[junglelord]

I know nothing of that web page, but appears that is was at STEREO site itself that the images with the spheres are available from the start of his video. Seems he found about them on the web site you mentioned.

I am taking a trip over to STEREO
yeah, I browsed the images, and I think they are artifacts.

[bboyer]

They're legitimate images from nasa stereo science center; for example:

higher res 2048pix listing from Jan 18th
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... /195/2048/

With one example from that listing at 05:36:02 UT where the [probable] artifacts (or whatever) are off to the right-side position at the periphery
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... uB_195.jpg

[larryduane100]

I remember a couple of sungrazer comets made the news last week because they were "destroyed" as they disappeared. Could they have survived? Could they have acted as kernels that grew in size by z-pinch if it is true that the spheres are huge(planet-sized)? A massive CME could launch them into a cometary orbit! Comets were found to be composed of minerals that are formed in high temperature. The corona is the fusion zone. This is very interesting.
Larryduane100

[RayTomes]

...
With one example from that listing at 05:36:02 UT where the [probable] artifacts (or whatever) are off to the right-side position at the periphery
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... uB_195.jpg

Hi Arc-us,

Thanks for the proper link.

Not only are there two on the right near each other, there is another just above them to the left, one way down to the left at about 8 o'clock, and one in front of the sun at about 4 o'clock and 1/2 of the way from centre outwards.

I guess what is needed is to link up the positions between the frames and work out what path and velocity these things are traveling on. Then we would know if they are coming out of the Sun or in orbit or what.

Ray

[RayTomes]

Looking at more of the frames it is clear that the objects are not showing a steady motion between frames. They are either different objects each frame, or at least traveling a distance of about the Sun's diameter in the time between frames. As the frames are taken just 10 minutes apart, and the Sun's diameter is 1,400,000 km they would need to be doing 2,300 km/s if they were at the same distance as the Sun.

Of course they would only be needing to do 460 km/s if they were 1/5 of the way between the craft and the sun. That is about the typically velocity of the Solar wind. However the Solar wind would be traveling in line between the Sun and the camera, so they would need to be going much faster or be still closer to move out of the next frame in 10 minutes.

On top of that, the two objects to the right in the picture http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... uB_195.jpg are spherical looking, but their shadows are in a different direction than away from the Sun. How can that be? Also, they are lit as if they are on the far side of the Sun if the Sun were what was lighting them. All of that is pretty much impossible.

So I think that the most likely explanation is that they are bits of dirt inside the camera system and moving about randomly bouncing off the sides of the camera in zero g. This is supported also by the fact that they are sometimes in focus and sometimes out of focus.

[RayTomes]

More on this ... See http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/news.shtml which says:

Date – May 15, 2009

Regular viewers of SOHO and STEREO data are well familiar with the variety of strange artifacts we see in the satellites images sometimes. We see various strange blobs, reflections and streaks, and I frequently get emails about them (which is something I strongly encourage: you learn by asking questions, so ask away!). Of course, all of these things we see in the data are completely explainable when armed with the appropriate knowledge of CCD detectors (like in digital cameras) and instrument optics (telescopes, lenses, etc). So after over 13 years of SOHO/LASCO images, we have seen and explained every weird artefact that has appeared in the data, and occasionally responded to a few popular myths. More recently (October 2006), we launched the STEREO/SECCHI mission and began send back data from that too. As expected, the STEREO/SECCHI 'COR2' telescopes see exactly the same blobs and streaks (dust, cosmic rays, etc) that we see in LASCO. So no explanation needed there. But the Heliospheric Imagers (HI) are a new kind of telescope and with that comes a new set of strange image effects. So what I'm going to do here is address the two most commonly questioned artifacts that we see in the HI images and explain what they are and why we see them.

More at http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php ... h89#ghosts

[mharratsc]

That was a good find, Ray. Considering how uniform those spheres seem to be, I would surmise that they are indeed some kind of specular artifact, or possibly dust either inside or outside of the lens.

That... or there is a fleet of very large UFO's circling our Sun and they're catchin' some gnarly tans, dudes!

[tayga]

I agree with Ray on this. They look artificial. The apparent 'shadowing' is not oriented parallel to the photosphere but does align with the x-axis of the image so it could be a scan error. The object apparently lit from the wrong side is otherwise similar to the almost-correctly lit objects but the 'shadow' is also parallel to the image x-axis.

[nick c]

I agree with Ray.
It is either an artifact of the camera (lenses, mirrors, etc) or of the image processing. A speck of dust or debris is possible or a glitch in the processing.


Solar Images (thumbnails)

Here is the image taken Jan 18, 2010, 05:36:02, it shows the two "objects" just off the right limb of the Sun.
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... uB_195.jpg

Caption:

Image of the Sun, taken by the SECCHI Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI)
on the STEREO Behind observatory on January 18, 2010 at 05:36:02 UT.
The 195 Angstrom bandpass is sensitive to the Fe XII ionization state
of iron, at a characteristic temperature of about 1.4 million degrees Kelvin.
This image was produced from the STEREO space weather beacon telemetry.
Because of the high amount of compression used for the space weather beacon,
the image quality is far lower than in the final science product.
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... uB_195.txt

Here is the image taken ten minutes before the one with the two "objects":
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... uB_195.jpg
The "objects" are not in the image.

Here is the image taken ten minutes after the one with the two "objects":
http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/brows ... uB_195.jpg
Again, the "objects" are not in the image.

That they are not in the previous and after images is convincing evidence that they are not real objects in the solar corona, but must be artifacts of the camera or image processing.

Nick

[junglelord]

Artifacts of imaging, no dust on the camara lens, they are made in a super clean room, so no dust.

[Doureios]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum although i'm following this site and plasma cosmology in general for quite some time now.

I've seen these images a couple of days ago and to me the explanations given by the "SOHO Comets" site that Ray provided is not satisfactory.

It appears to me that the guy providing the explanations in that site tends to blaim everything strange and irregular to lense tricks and flares.. he provides a video too (http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/images/ve ... ghtens.mp4) showing something that might be a plasma erruption from Venus, and uses it in order to explain that planets don't explode so this must be due to lense sensitivity errors. His logic is in the form "since planets don't explode and Venus is still there, what we see it's obviously a lense trick".

What we see in the new images may be just created planets in very close orbit arround the Sun. They may appear and disapper not due to their orbit (i.e fast and irregular), but because maybe they just don't make it for more than few minutes and they disintegrate.

Just a thought

Doureios