A 3D Solar Wave

When a coronal mass ejection (CME) erupts from the Sun, movies in extreme ultraviolet light often show enormous waves, spreading over a large area on the solar surface, just as tsunamis travel far from the original seismic event. Now STEREO data have been used to show that these waves are the footprints of giant domes that spread upward into the corona as well as outward across the surface. Astrid Veronig and colleagues at the University of Graz in Austria say this dome is part of a coronal shock wave, separate from the CME itself, traveling at 280 km/s along the solar surface, but headed upwards at 650 km/s (almost 1.5 million miles per hour). This is the first time the full wave front has been seen moving through the corona as well as across the solar surface. These results have just been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters

The movie shows images from January 17, 2010 in the 195 A band of of STEREO-B's SECCHI/Extreme UltraViolet Imager (EUVI). To the left is a running difference movie in which the previous frame is subtracted from the current frame. This emphasizes faint changes. You can easily see the wave spreading across the solar disk and into the corona. To the right are the regular EUVI images.

More about STEREO observations of this kind of solar wave:
Do Solar Tsunami's Exist?

Solar Tsunami Blasts Across the Sun

Abstract of the scientific paper

• 3D_EITwave.mp4