For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called Spicules: Jets on the Sun, uploaded on November 2, 2010. It is a picture of thousands of young spicules on the sun. This picture is the highest revolution yet of these solar flux-like tubes.
If one were to imagine a pipe made of a transparent magnetic field as wide as Florida and as long as the Earth, filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour, one would be envisioning one of the thousand spicules on the sun. Spicules are glowing tendrils of hot gas that project from the sun's surface. They last for about five minutes before they vanish, making them hard to study. They start out as tall tubes or rising gas, but they tend to fade back down as the gas reaches its peak, and then falls back down to the Sun. These spicules line the frame in the picture, the solar active region 11092, which crossed the Sun just last month. The spicules seem to converge at the sunspot, located in the lower left of the picture. Scientists still do not know what determines the creation and dynamics of spicules, and they are actively researching the topic.
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