Unruly Sun Emerges in Solar Observatory's First Results

摘要

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" was how William Butler Yeats evoked faceless doom in his poem "The Second Coming." The glare of the sun may still seem pitiless, but it is blank no longer--at least not to solar physicists, and especially not to researchers analyzing the initial torrent of data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a spacecraft that has been returning the sun's glare with a steady gaze of its own since early this year.