What is this thing to the lower left in this NASA solar photo?

AllTheQuestionsToday said:
This here, lower left, zoom in:
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Just curious: how and where did you find this? The date 2016 seems to suggest it is a very old photo. Has it only just been released? Or has someone been looking through a lot of old photos with a magnifying glass? Is there any commentary from Nasa? Do any other photos from before and after show the same oddity?
 
FatPhil said:
Looks quite similar to a cosmic ray streaking across the sensor:
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That might account for the straight line, but in close-up there appears to be a structure of some kind attached to the end of it. If it is actually in the vicinity of the sun, the structure would be huge. Would have to be the biggest UFO ever spotted. Makes objects the size of a football field seem pathetic.

Edit: searching Twitter for 'NASA solar photo UFO' shows some similar examples, possibly even bigger. Evidently NASA are careless about scrubbing these things out of their photo releases!
 
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My guess is that you won’t see it in the images from the other three AIA telescopes at the same time. I don’t have the time to look now but sure someone could.
 
DavidB66 said:
searching Twitter for 'NASA solar photo UFO' shows some similar examples, possibly even bigger.
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This page goes into detail about the telescopes and these strange artifacts. I dont want to copy/paste the whole article page,s o y'all will have to click. sorry.

Basically, like @FatPhil said...cosmic rays.


Article:
The Alleged SOHO UFO

This is the image of a supposed UFO that according to “ufological experts” clearly shows a ship that has absorbed energy from the sun and is taking off into space.


ufo.jpg


Below you can see the image compared to the other channels at other wavelengths at 17.1 (blue), 19.5 (green) and 30.5 (red) nanometers. No trace of the UFO on the other channels

eit_mosaic.jpg

Likewise, if we look at images of SOHO's successor, the SDO satellite, no strange features appear either. Here is a video of SDO in 19.3 nm


Article:
But isn't it quite a coincidence that the cosmic ray has hit the detector just near the edge of the sun and that it follows a path that almost exactly coincides with the radial direction leaving the sun? It would be in a single image. But SOHO has been observing since 1995, taking these images every 12 minutes and on 4 different channels. That's millions of images. The trail in the image extends about 33 pixels into the solar disk. The solar circumference strip with 33 pixels width represents 7% of the total pixels in the image. That means 7% of the cosmic rays will originate in the correct region. The orientation of this trail is about 2 degrees from the direction to the center of the disk, which is more or less what gives us the appearance that they have the same direction to the eye. That means that a fraction 4/360 of the cosmic rays will have the correct orientation, following the radial direction. Combining these two numbers we have that approximately one in every thousand cosmic rays will appear to originate near the edge of the sun and exit in a radial direction. Taking into account the relative frequency of occurrence of these impacts and that millions of images exist, I estimate that cosmic rays will produce a “UFO” like this in approximately one in every 10,000 images of SOHO.
 
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So, this is the explanation that I got from someone who worked on this instrument, and I will paraphrase.

As described in Lemen et al. (2012, Solar Physics 275:17-40), energetic particles in the space environment can impact the detector, resulting in a release of charge in a single pixel and possibly adjacent pixels depending on the energy and direction of the particle. If that release of charge happens over a few milliseconds, it can appear as a vertical streak as the columns are read out.

The general characteristic of a vertical stripe that gradually decays in brightness with distance from the readout amp is consistent with that type of feature.

There is a “despiking” algorithm that attempts to remove pixels contaminated by particle hits, but sometimes that can leave artifacts as the algorithm attempts to use the pixels surrounding a contaminated pixel to establish a new value. The data released to scientists and the public have already undergone this automated despiking process. I’m guessing that if you search through the thousands and thousands of images you’ll be able to find a few where the algorithm wasn’t perfect at its job. As you can see from another image presented in this thread, the despiking algorithm is primarily corrected single pixel effects, and it doesn’t necessarily remove streaks, which can be caused by this effect or by particles that go through the detector at a steep angle (which should be significantly rarer than single pixel events).

An interesting side note is that the information about the spikes is kept and a recent paper was published in which the spike detection frequency was correlated with radiation environment parameters in order to study the Van Allen radiation belts (Kasapis et al. 2023; Space Weather vol 21, issue 3).
 
I will also note that it may be possible to obtain an image from prior to despiking but that would take some effort that I don’t have much time for, sorry.
 
How could a cosmic ray coming from the Sun NOT be perpendicular to the Sun it is coming from? The cosmic ray should be parallel to the radius of the Sun. The only credible explanation imo is a detector glitch.
 
Mendel said:
Solar rays come from the sun, cosmic rays come from the cosmos, i.e. outer space.
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Solar rays would only come from the sun (not that I like that precise term, it doesn't imply the particulate nature of most of them, "solar particles" would be more accurate), but cosmic rays as originally named could come from anywhere including the sun - it's a complete catch-all term coined when we didn't have a clue about what they were or where they were coming from. We've started to exclude electromagnetic radiation from the catch-all, as we have more precise terms for those now. Even that distinction might not be useful, as those gamma rays can cause cascades when reaching our atmosphere, so they end up being particulate even if they travelled here as EM. Attempting to give historical catch-all words more restrictive meanings over time rarely works (c.f. "fruit", "nut", and "berry"), so IMHO it's just best to explicitly say "extrasolar cosmic rays" if you wish to exclude the solar ones.
 
If this is a solar ray, it would be perpendicular, like the examples in the thread. But the original picture has a ray with an acute angle. So this must not be a solar ray. Yet the examples in the thread claiming this is a cosmic ray show us solar rays. The examples do not seem all that relevant, because as you two explained, these are completely different things than what the thread is about.
 
Jedlik said:
If this is a solar ray, it would be perpendicular, like the examples in the thread. But the original picture has a ray with an acute angle. So this must not be a solar ray.
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Are you sure about that? I don't think that's true since photons coming out of the sun will be scattered somewhat by the sun and its atmosphere. It might just be a useful approximation but not physically true
 
yoshy said:
Are you sure about that? I don't think that's true since photons coming out of the sun will be scattered somewhat by the sun and its atmosphere. It might just be a useful approximation but not physically true
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A high energy photon could emerge from the sun, and then cause a cascade of charged particles to fan out in the atmosphere, and therefore not appear to come from the sun, despite that being the ultimate cause.
 
AmberRobot said:
I don’t know the origin of this image but i think you are right that it is the same or similar effect like the original post
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No, this is not the same.

This glitch covers most of the screen, from our perspective it "starts" way above the Sun, and "continues" under the Sun aswell, covering most of what we see. The other glitch was dissimilar: Only a fraction of the screen shows it and the origin is blocked by the Sun or is the Sun itself.

The glitch in this picture is much much less consistent (width, brightness) than the one in the original picture.

The glitch in this picture is above the Sun, the glitch hides the surface of the Sun meaning the glitch is "between" the lens and the Sun. But the glitch in the original picture does not block the Sun, it is behind it or soming from the Sun. This lowkey disproves the similar glitch theory, but it is possible this is a coincidence.

If anything, this picture proves that it is not a glitch because there are too many dissimilarities to the original picture. And I am talking about differences which are hard to explain because these instruments are much more sensitive than an average lens. A glitch has to be similar to another glitch to claim a common cause.
 
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Jedlik said:
No, this is not the same.

This glitch covers most of the screen, from our perspective it "starts" way above the Sun, and "continues" under the Sun aswell, covering most of what we see. The other glitch was dissimilar: Only a fraction of the screen shows it and the origin is blocked by the Sun or is the Sun itself.

The glitch in this picture is much much less consistent (width, brightness) than the one in the original picture.

The glitch in this picture is above the Sun, the glitch hides the surface of the Sun meaning the glitch is "between" the lens and the Sun. But the glitch in the original picture does not block the Sun, it is behind it or soming from the Sun. This lowkey disproves the similar glitch theory, but it is possible this is a coincidence.

If anything, this picture proves that it is not a glitch because there are too many dissimilarities to the original picture. And I am talking about differences which are hard to explain because these instruments are much more sensitive than an average lens. A glitch has to be similar to another glitch to claim a common cause.
Click to expand...

I disagree with this analysis. You seem to think that there's only one kind of solar ray, and that it comes with a narrow band of energies, and whilst that may have been theories about them were formulated speculatively as energy from fusion a century ago, that's not what we know about them today.

If pressed for an analysis, I'd probably speculatively say the #16 glitch probably started below the sun, and then moved upwards, losing energy charging up the sensor cells as it goes. The splat along its length is probably just a coincidence. That of course doesn't mean it's not ultimately caused by a solar ray for the reasons I've already stated. However, I'd need to know a bit more about the sensor array, as that streak is suspiciously oriented, I wonder if it's an internal electronic effect causing a unidirectional bleed of current along a row of sensor cells, rather than actually being the path of an excited exogenous particle. (Or gimme a hundred more streaks from that sensor, it will reveal itself statistically, I can work forwards or backwards.)

#16's a poor quality image with much lower resolution that looks like it's had a couple of generations of lossy processing performed on it, I would give it too much weight in order to support any argument about what the original is or isn't. That you can find examples from a class that are different from the exhibit under investigation doesn't exclude that exhibit from being in that class. It more justifiably adds support to the known fact that there's plenty of variation possible.

The "blocking" or not is probably nothing to do with coming from in front of the sun or not, it's more likely just a matter of contrast. There's wide variation in energies, thus a wide range of brightnesses available.
 
Jedlik said:
How could a cosmic ray coming from the Sun NOT be perpendicular to the Sun it is coming from? The cosmic ray should be parallel to the radius of the Sun. The only credible explanation imo is a detector glitch.
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As I understand it, when a highly energetic particle hits a CCD sensor (like those on SDO [1]) at an angle, it lights up a track of pixels that correspond to the angle of incidence/path of the particle through the sensor. This illustration is from a paper about cosmic ray effects on CMOS sensors:
1696314858629.png

The same effect is described in this paper about detecting cosmic rays with CCD sensors:
Article:
Muons which are incident on the sensor at a shallow angle will leave long tracks in the silicon. As the muon passes through the sensor, the drift distance for the deposited charge will vary from zero at the gate-side to the full thickness of the sensor at the back-side. Charges generated furthest away from the gates therefore drift further before collection, and are thus subject to more diffusion, leading to a wider track.

There could be a difference in angle of incidence (albeit small at the distance from SDO to the Sun) from a solar ray generated from the top of the Sun versus the bottom for example, or it could just be random cosmic rays like Mendel mentioned.

[1] "Both instruments [AIA/HMI] share use of a custom-designed 16 million pixel science-grade CCD and common camera readout electronics."
 
MonkeeSage said:
There could be a difference in angle of incidence (albeit small at the distance from SDO to the Sun) from a solar ray generated from the top of the Sun versus the bottom for example, or it could just be random cosmic rays like Mendel mentioned.
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It's suddenly struck me, from an oblique angle, obviously, that there's no reason for a CCD to be facing the thing it's taking an image of anyway. Quite often the light path is reflected by mirrors, in particular when there are multiple sensors or simply from geometric constraints. So check the blueprints before making any firm conclusions about directions.

Edit: note that higher energy photons, the kind that would cause streaks on the sensor, would likely not be reflected by mirrors because their wavelength is so short they simply don't see a "mirror". It might see a nucleon or an electron, but it won't be neatly reflecting if that happens.
 
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FatPhil said:
It's suddenly struck me, from an oblique angle, obviously, that there's no reason for a CCD to be facing the thing it's taking an image of anyway. Quite often the light path is reflected by mirrors, in particular when there are multiple sensors or simply from geometric constraints. So check the blueprints before making any firm conclusions about directions.

Edit: note that higher energy photons, the kind that would cause streaks on the sensor, would likely not be reflected by mirrors because their wavelength is so short they simply don't see a "mirror". It might see a nucleon or an electron, but it won't be neatly reflecting if that happens.
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The AIA telescopes on SDO are normal incidence Cassegrain telescopes. The normal of the detector is parallel with the optical axis so it is indeed facing the Sun.

The Sun is about half a degree on the sky so the range of angles for Solar cosmic rays are quite small but other cosmic rays may come from other angles.
 
MonkeeSage said:
As I understand it, when a highly energetic particle hits a CCD sensor (like those on SDO [1]) at an angle, it lights up a track of pixels that correspond to the angle of incidence/path of the particle through the sensor. This illustration is from a paper about cosmic ray effects on CMOS sensors:
1696314858629.png

The same effect is described in this paper about detecting cosmic rays with CCD sensors:
Article:
Muons which are incident on the sensor at a shallow angle will leave long tracks in the silicon. As the muon passes through the sensor, the drift distance for the deposited charge will vary from zero at the gate-side to the full thickness of the sensor at the back-side. Charges generated furthest away from the gates therefore drift further before collection, and are thus subject to more diffusion, leading to a wider track.

There could be a difference in angle of incidence (albeit small at the distance from SDO to the Sun) from a solar ray generated from the top of the Sun versus the bottom for example, or it could just be random cosmic rays like Mendel mentioned.

[1] "Both instruments [AIA/HMI] share use of a custom-designed 16 million pixel science-grade CCD and common camera readout electronics."
Click to expand...
But still: If this glitch is in the sensors that must mean the Sun will not visually block the glitch itself. Because the Sun is behind the glitch from our perspective. It does appear as the glitch ends just where the first pixel of the Sun is. We need to find a similar example because the current one is DISSIMILAR in nature to the picture the thread started with.

I am not saying the Sun blocks the glitch, but it certainly seems that way (if this is a cosmic ray). I consider the "strange angled solar ray" explanation more credible because of the optical illusion I mentioned. My point still stands: Those pictures and the original post show different things technically. They might be the same thing looking different in two pictures but it is certainly not proven.

FatPhil said:
The "blocking" or not is probably nothing to do with coming from in front of the sun or not, it's more likely just a matter of contrast. There's wide variation in energies, thus a wide range of brightnesses available.
Click to expand...
How come the new example does not show any sign of a similar effect? Only the original picture, despite being a lot detailed?
 
Jedlik said:
How come the new example does not show any sign of a similar effect? Only the original picture, despite being a lot detailed?
Click to expand...

How come a different thing is different?
Because it's different.

Form a better question, and I will provide a better answer.
 
Jedlik said:
But still: If this glitch is in the sensors that must mean the Sun will not visually block the glitch itself. Because the Sun is behind the glitch from our perspective. It does appear as the glitch ends just where the first pixel of the Sun is.
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I don't understand this at all.

First, we live in a 3D universe, cosmic rays can hit the sensor from anywhere. Since they don't have to go through the optics, they can also hit the sensor anywhere, e.g. where the image of the sun is. The photons from the sun and the cosmic ray particle create charges in the sensor; these charges are not "behind" one another, they simply add up if they happen to hit the same sensor cell (pixel).

Which picture, exactly, are you talking about, with "the glitch ends just where the first pixel of the Sun is"?
 
FatPhil said:
How come a different thing is different?
Because it's different.

Form a better question, and I will provide a better answer.
Click to expand...
I mean sure, the question was loaded, I understand you want another one.

The original picture has a glitch/ray which is interesting. Some people tried to provide similar examples. None of those are similar.

Original glitch/ray:

Not perpendicular with the Surface of the Sun. A solar ray would follow the direction of the radius of the Sun. ALL examples of solar rays are perpendicular to the Sun's surface. This detail makes these examples useless.

Does not block the Sun from the cameraview. Seemingly the glitch/ray originates from the Sun or from behind the Sun. Most sensor glitches posted as examples block the Sun, meaning the "glitch" is detected closer to the sensor than the Sun. Obviously the ray hits the sensor and blocks the view of the Sun. How come that does not happen here? This detail is problematic because in order to prove that these examples and the picture we have here is comparable, you need to find one where the glitch is similar. Where the glitch starts at the edge of the Sun or a star. Or we can assume it is a coincidence or a spaceship, because assuming is just making stuff up.

So my question is: Why do people in this thread consider those pictures examples of a "similar" glitch despite showing huge illogical differences?
 
The “glitch” is not an object being imaged by the camera. It is an artifact arising within the sensor itself caused by a high energy particle passing through the sensor and then smeared across the image by the reading out of the charge in the detector.

Any discussion of “in front of” or “behind” the Sun is not meaningful.
 
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Jedlik said:
Not perpendicular with the Surface of the Sun. A solar ray would follow the direction of the radius of the Sun. ALL examples of solar rays are perpendicular to the Sun's surface. This detail makes these examples useless.
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it may not have been a solar ray

Jedlik said:
Obviously the ray hits the sensor and blocks the view of the Sun.
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Tonight, sit in a room with a window. Turn out the lights so you can see outside. Turn on a flashlight (your phone's will do) and point it at the window. The bright reflection from the flashlight will prevent you from seeing what's outside, at the point where the reflection is.
Would it be proper to say that the flashlight reflection blocks the window view? What is actually happening?

Jedlik said:
Obviously the ray hits the sensor and blocks the view of the Sun. How come that does not happen here?
Click to expand...
Because this ray/particle hit the sensor in a different place from where the sun is.
 
Here's a magnified view of the 'glitch', which shows that it does seem to originate in the Sun, although probably not from the core. It seems to me that the particle detected here may have originated in the edge, or limb, of the Sun, and produced a vertical streak in the CCD sensor.
particle.jpg

I'd be more concerned if the streak completely missed the surface of the Sun altogether, but even then the particle may have been deflected by the strong, chaotic magnetic fields in the vicinity of the Sun.
 
Eburacum said:
Here's a magnified view of the 'glitch', which shows that it does seem to originate in the Sun, although probably not from the core. It seems to me that the particle detected here may have originated in the edge, or limb, of the Sun, and produced a vertical streak in the CCD sensor.
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A vertical streak in a CCD sensor comes from the shuffling of charge along columns prior to the serial readout along rows. The initial interaction of the particle with the detector would have occurred in a single pixel (or multiple adjacent pixels).

Eburacum said:
I'd be more concerned if the streak completely missed the surface of the Sun altogether, but even then the particle may have been deflected by the strong, chaotic magnetic fields in the vicinity of the Sun.
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The streak has nothing to do with the surface of the Sun. The length of the streak has more to do with the timescale for release of charge by the particle interaction with the sensor and the readout rate of the CCD.

This isn't an object imaged by the camera, it's a defect arising in the sensor itself. It's as if you got a piece of dust on your camera's sensor and you were arguing where in the scene you photographed the shadow of the dust originated. Any correlation with the scene of the Sun on the sensor's field of view is just coincidental.

A streak like this could occur even if the "lens cap" were on.
 
AmberRobot said:
This isn't an object imaged by the camera, it's a defect arising in the sensor itself.
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This is likely the correct answer, and I am not even debating it, just pointing out that the examples provided as "similar" glitches were not really looking similar. They were similar technically, just not visually. Not useful to convince a layman.
 
Thanks! That is more or less how I interpreted this phenomenon, until I noticed that many of the 'glitches' given as examples in this thread have streaks which are 'perpendicular' to the centre of the Sun. Here are two.
perp.jpg

Notice that the 'streak' is consistently pointed towards the centre of the Sun, within a few degrees. This may be a coincidence, and might simply be a result of the random orientation of the CCD grid. Since the particle might have originated anywhere on or beneath the surface of the Sun, this might explain why the streaks in these images tend to be radial with respect to the centre of the Sun.

On the other hand, this image shows a vertical streak, offset from the centre of the Sun, which resembles the image in the OP more closely.
5830e467c461885b5a8b4644.jpg

My suggestion is that these particles hit the CCD more-or-less at the same angle as the photons do, and so tend to cluster within the disk of the Sun - generally near the centre, but sometimes towards the limb.
 
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I believe (do not know, just believe) that if the glitch is parallel to the radius of the Sun, like the above examples, then the glitch originates from the Sun
 
Perhaps. I would add that the particles do not need to come directly from the centre of the Sun, but they can come from the edge as well, or anywhere within its disc.
 
Cosmic ray and particle strikes on space-borne detectors are so common that I have no doubt one could look through the thousands upon thousands of images from these instruments and cherry pick a few that have streaks that look like they are streaking radially from the Sun.
 
AmberRobot said:
Cosmic ray and particle strikes on space-borne detectors are so common that I have no doubt one could look through the thousands upon thousands of images from these instruments and cherry pick a few that have streaks that look like they are streaking radially from the Sun.
Click to expand...
or automated streak removal tools might be set not to remove those
 
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