A filament eruption as captured by the AIRA's telescopes in Romania. Credits: Cristian Dănescu
A solar explosion from an unexpected area of the Sun observed by AIRA
On March 13, 2023, during AIRA's solar patrol, we observed a spectacular phenomena - a filament eruption, followed by an C3.1-class flare. A C-class flare is a medium-sized flare that releases energies from 10−6 to 10−5 W/m2 (for peak flux range at 0.1-0.8 nm), an energy that would be equivalent to one 100 W light-bulb emitting light for more than 6 days.
AIRA's solar patrol data is observing the solar full disk in white light and Halpha every day the weather conditions permit, and the data is available at http://solar1.astro.ro/~solar/observations.html. The instrument is a refractor – Carl Zeiss Jena refractor 80/1200 mm with an Halpha filter (Solar Spectrum S-1.5 (0.3A)), while the CCD camera used is an Atik11000 (4008x2672 px, 0.009 mm, 16 bit).
The observed filament eruption was not associated to any active region on the Sun's surface, such as defined by NOAA and can be found at https://www.solarmonitor.org/, and was located at N27E07 (Carrington coordinates). The filaments’ length, before the eruption, was ~250000 km.
Published on: Mar 15, 2023
