Radio image of the Sun
Movie: 0.28 MBytes
Nobeyama movie: GIF animation of a flare and prominence eruption on the east limb of the Sun at 17 GHz (the file is 0.4 MBytes)
This movie shows an image every 10 minutes. The event has the classic signatures of an event associated with a coronal mass ejection: motion is seen in the prominence material first, then the flare goes off, leaving long-duration soft-X-ray emitting loops around for several hours. In this case, we also see activity south of the flare site: it is difficult to say whether this is additional prominence material lifting off, or hot material which has cooled in the corona and is now falling back to the solar surface. Note that the prominence material is at a temperature of less than 10000 degrees K, whereas the flare loops come from material at 10000000 K: both cool and hot material show up at this radio wavelength.
The left panel shows total intensity, and the right panel shows circularly-polarized radio emission (only detected during the early phase of the flare, as usual, when very energetic electrons may be present). Note that for a few frames at the flare peak the flare distorts the method by which the solar disk is centered in the image and this produces a small spurious motion most visible in the V maps.