Pleiades, Planets, And Hot Plasma
Explanation:
Bright stars of the Pleiades, four planets, and erupting solar plasma are
all captured in this
spectacular image from
the space-based SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
In the foreground of the 15 degree wide field of view, a bubble
of hot plasma, called a Coronal Mass Ejection
(
CME), is blasting away from the
active Sun whose position
and relative size is indicated
by the central white circle.
Beyond appear four of the
five naked-eye
planets --
courtesy of
the
planetary alignment which
did not destroy the world!
In the background are distant stars and the famous
Pleiades star cluster,
also easily visible to the unaided eye when it shines in the
night sky.
Distances for these
familiar celestial objects are;
the
Sun,
150 million kilometers away;
Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn,
about 58, 110, 780, and 1,400 million kilometers beyond the Sun
respectively; and the
Pleiades
star cluster at a mere 3,800 trillion kilometers
(400 light-years).
SOHO itself orbits 1.5 million kilometers sunward of planet Earth.
The
image
was recorded by the Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO)
instrument on board SOHO on Monday, May 15 at 10:42 UT.
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell
(USRA)
NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings,
and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris.
Specific
rights apply.
A service of:
LHEA at
NASA /
GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
