NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released an hour-long time-lapse video showing the 133 days of the Sun’s life. The video shows the chaotic surface of the Sun with broad curves of plasma along the magnetic field lines above the star. Sometimes the circulating plasma recombines with the star, and sometimes it is ejected into space, creating dangerous space weather.

The image comes from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a spacecraft launched in 2010 as part of NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) program. Its primary mission took five years, but NASA says SDO should be operational by 2030.

Images in the movie were shot at 108 second intervals in the ultraviolet with SDO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE). SDO is in geosynchronous orbit 22,000 kilometers (13,670 miles) above Earth and orbits the Sun every 27 days, creating an ever-changing view of the stellar surface.

During the observation, the SDO measures the interior of the Sun, the magnetic field, and the hot plasma in the solar corona. It also measures the radiation produced by the ionospheres of Earth and other planets.

SDO captures approximately 70,000 images every day with a total volume of up to 1.5 terabytes. That’s an extraordinary amount of data and a 2017 article NatureCompiling all this data into a single repository, he describes it as “…one of the richest and largest solar image data repositories available to humanity.”

Most astronomy deals with distant stars in other solar systems along the Milky Way. It’s easy to forget that we live next to a powerful star that turns hydrogen into helium long before any life appears on Earth, and that it will outlast all life on Earth. Many things happen in the Sun, and its activity affects the Earth and everything that lives on it. The sun provides a constantly reliable source of energy, but it also has a disturbing, almost malevolent aspect.

NASA’s LWS program aims to better understand the Sun, in part so we can understand and predict strong space weather that can damage satellites, power grids and other infrastructure. SDO plays an important role in this effort.

“SDO will determine how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated, configured, and translated into violent solar events that drive space weather,” says a document describing the mission.

The spacecraft turned out to be very successful. In 2020, NASA shot a video for the observatory’s 10th anniversary. He highlighted ten important observations and discoveries. SDO observed powerful bursts of bursts, discovered a new type of wave, watched planets passing in front of the Sun, and watched a star smash into a comet that came too close.

SDO is not alone in studying the Sun. ESA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) has been studying the Sun since its launch in 1995. In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, which became the closest man-made object to the Sun. In 2020, ESA launched the Solar Orbiter, which will take close-up images of the Sun and study the star’s polar regions.

The sun is a scientifically interesting object, but it is also visually fascinating and anyone can relate to it. As our nascent civilization’s space economy improves, we will have more satellites and other infrastructure (perhaps on the surface of the Moon) that will be vulnerable to harsh space weather. Solar observatories like SDO make it possible to predict space weather and ultimately prepare for it.