Giant dark coronal hole found on the sun: NASA

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NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory orbiting around the sun has taken a photograph of a giant dark hole on the sun. The hole is 50 times the diameter of Earth.

NASA revealed on its website that the hole, or a dark area, is called a ‘coronal hole.’ “A region on the sun where the magnetic field is open to interplanetary space, sending coronal material speeding out in what is called a high-speed solar wind stream.”

It might seem like an emergency, that there is some dark hole on the sun. However, NASA says these coronal holes are not an unfamiliar occurrence. They are simply, “regions where the sun’s corona is dark. These features were discovered when X-ray telescopes were first flown above the Earth’s atmosphere to reveal the structure of the corona across the solar disc.”

They are related to “open” magnetic field lines and are frequently found at the sun’s shafts. Rather than keeping hot gas together, these open magnetic field lines cause a formation of coronal holes where sun oriented wind can be radiated at high speeds.

The gap in the sun’s magnetic “created a geomagnetic storm near Earth that resulted in several nights of aurora,” earlier in the month, NASA revealed.

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