Dubbed AR 2192, the “freakishly huge” sunspot spanned some 80,000 miles, or about the same size as the diameter of Jupiter.
The video was created by Infinity Imagined science blogger James Tyrwhitt-Drake, who stitched together more than 17,000 images of the spot snapped by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
The video condenses 16.5 days into less than eight minutes, according to CNET.
Tyrwhitt-Drake also created a clip that zooms in on the sunspot (below):
What caused the sunspot to be so big? NASA scientist C. Alex Young told Space.com that experts "really don’t know.”
"Being close to solar maximum [the peak in the sun's 11-year solar cycle] means there is more concentrated magnetic field and magnetic energy under the solar surface waiting to bubble up," Young said. "But the question of why it comes up as one spot instead of two or more is really still unknown, a mystery."
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/11/sunspot-time-lapse-ar-2192_n_6137490.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news&ir=Weird+News and provided by entertainment-movie-news.com
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