Orange Sun Oozing
			
		
		
		
			The Sun's surface keeps changing.  
Click the central arrow and watch how the 
Sun's surface oozes during a single hour.  
The 
Sun's photosphere 
has thousands of bumps called 
granules and usually a few dark depressions called 
sunspots.  
The 
above time-lapse movie centered on 
Sunspot 875 was taken in 2006 by the 
Vacuum Tower Telescope in the 
Canary Islands of 
Spain using 
adaptive optics to resolve details below 500 kilometers across.  
Each of the numerous granules is the size of an Earth continent, but much shorter lived. 
A granule 
slowly changes its shape over an hour, and can even completely disappear.  
Hot hydrogen 
gas rises in the bright center of a granule, and falls back into the Sun along a dark granule edge.  
The above movie and 
similar movies 
allows students  and solar scientists to study how granules and 
sunspots evolve as well as how 
magnetic sunspot regions produce powerful 
solar flares.