NASA: Van Gogh Sun

About this video

Data into art into science.

After the swirling patterns of ocean currents the team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre are at it again.

This time the post-impressionist patterns are temperature-change maps representing the heating and cooling of plasma across the sun's atmosphere, or corona.

Solar scientist Nicholean Viall has pioneered a new technique to "turn raw numbers of data into useful, understandable information".

The image assembly technology looks at active areas of the sun in six different wavelengths over a 24-hour period, one pixel at a time. By comparing the brightness of a pixel in two different wavelengths the process colour codes areas according to the changing temperature. 160,000 pixels create a colour map showing how long the sun's plasma took to heat or cool. 

With the abundance of red, orange and yellow patterns indicating patterns of cooling, Viall concludes that heating of the corona must be occurring in numerous rapid bursts of energy, known as "nanoflares".

There's more in depth information on NASA's video page where you can also download the public domain video and related images.