Scientists explain mystery of bright red dots that appeared during solar eclipse
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images/Keegan Barber/NASA via Getty Images
After months of waiting, the solar eclipse captured much of the US earlier this week.
The very rare solar eclipse took place across Mexico, North America and Canada on Monday (8 April), an event that has been hugely anticipated.
The spectacle occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, subsequently blocking its rays from reaching us and casting an incredible shadow.
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Many Americans travelled to the eclipse's path of totality, a path that saw the eclipse go through the likes of Mazatlán and Torreón in Mexico; San Antonio, Austin and Dallas in Texas, and Little Rock in Arkansas.
While the eclipse was an exciting time, there were a lot of warnings issued ahead of the spectacle, including for owners of dogs and cats.
Those who were lucky enough to see the solar eclipse noticed reddish dots around the edges of the moon’s shadow.
"It makes your heart want to skip a beat, and you cannot really describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it in person,” retired educator Lynnice Carter told Nature after witnessing the amazing spectacle on Monday.
These red dots are known as prominences, enormous loops of plasma, which is impressively many times bigger than Earth.
Furthermore, these loops of plasma can last for several months, but why are they red?
Well, that's because they contain hydrogen glowing at extremely high temperatures, hence the redness.
Prominences can vary in size and shape, from small to large, while some are a lot more complex than you might expect, stretching across significant portions of the solar edge.
They are not technically classified as solar flares, but they appear with greater frequency during the Sun’s solar maximum phase.
If you witnessed the eclipse from within the path of totality, then you likely saw these prominences.
That would have included a particularly bright red speck at the Sun’s bottom region, while you might have also seen smaller beads appearing along its left and right sides.
NASA says the bright red dots seen during the eclipse consist of plasma, composed of electrically charged hydrogen and helium.
"The prominence plasma flows along a tangled and twisted structure of magnetic fields generated by the sun’s internal dynamo," the space agency details.
"An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma."
During the eclipse, astrophotographers were able to visualize the prominence, subsequently revealing its loop-like structure.