SP-402 A New Sun: The Solar Results
From Skylab
OUR TINY PLANET EARTH serves as a
yardstick to scale the thickness of the layers of the solar
atmosphere. The photosphere (orange layer), where sunspots are
formed, is about as thick as Alabama is wide-about 400 km. The less
dense and more turbulent chromosphere (red-orange) spans several
thousand kilometers, stretching on our scale from Alabama to Los
Angeles. The intensely active transition region (yellow), first
observed in detail by Skylab, is very thin-equal in width to
metropolitan Los Angeles. Spicules (red) extend the chromosphere into
the corona as pointed waves whose heights are roughly equal to
Earth's diameter. Prominences (not shown) and the corona (black)
reach far into interplanetary space, and are much too large for our
terrestrial scale.
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