SOHO/MDI and other SOHO Press Releases


August 18, 2011

SOHO/MDI and SDO/HMI Data Used to Detect Subsurface Signature of Erupting Active Regions

See the story on the HMI pages..

April 6, 2009

SOHO Featured in NASA's Mission Madness online voting competition

SOHO was chosen, and is, one of the 64 candidates for greatest NASA mission .

****UPDATE****
The voting has ended, and SOHO got second place in the competition! Great job everyone! Thank you for voting for SOHO in the Championship round of NASA's Mission Madness!

Interview with our star, the Sun.

Interview with Dr. Joe Gurman (NASA Goddard)

Here you can read the MDI Interview.

June 26, 2006

A New Sun Born in Computer Wears the Right Look for Eclipse

New NASA and National Science Foundation-funded research has produced the most true-to-life computer simulation ever made of our sun's multimillion-degree atmosphere, as confirmed by actual observations during the March 29 solar eclipse. MDI Magnetograms provide starting data for these calculations.

March 9, 2006

Solar Storms: Nowhere to Hide from SOHO's Improved 'X-Ray Vision'

Announcement of availability of the "full_farside" analyses. See also:

August 16, 2005

Scientists One Step Closer to Forecasting 'Clear Skies' for Astronauts

A discussion of the results published the TRACE and MDI team in "The Nonpotentiality of Active-Region Coronae and Dynamics of the Photospheric MAgnetic Field", to be published in the Astrophysicsl Journal on July 20, 2005.

January 3, 2003

Wave-like properties of solar supergranulation.

Analysis of SOHO data has revealed that the large convective cells known as supergranules propagate around the Sun like a wave. This discovery explains why the pattern of supergranulation appears to rotate faster than anything else on the solar surface.

June 5, 2002

Giant loops in the solar atmosphere may trigger Sun's magnetic poles reversals.

Analysis of SOHO and Yohkoh data has revealed that giant X-ray loops in the hot solar corona provide important magnetic links between sunspots and the Sun's magnetic poles. These giant loops are about 500,000 miles long and filed with 3,500,000 F hot electrified gas. The loops appear during the growing phase of the 11-year sunspot cycle, and are associated with bursts of the sunspot activity, which come every 1-1.5 years and cause reversal of the magnetic poles around the cycle maximum. It is suggested that these links play an important role in "solar dynamo", the process that generates strong magnetic fields on the Sun and is the source of sunspots, solar flares and mass ejections that affect the Earth space environment.

April 4, 2002

Torquing Up the Interior of the Sun (link to Imperial College)

Solar magnetism remains one of the big unsolved problems of physics. New findings on variations of the rotation rate deep in the Sun's convective envelope provide new insights into the solar dynamo. Reporting in Science, an international team has detected variations in the rotation rate of the solar interior which appear to be intimately connected with the 11-year cycle of the Sun's magnetic activity.



December 10, 2001

Inside the Sun- What Goes on In a Giant Active Region

Using an instrument on the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, helioseismologists studied the changing structure underlying the largest active region of the current solar cycle and found that the manner in which it formed and grew was contrary to expectations. And, investigators discovered that the area beneath a sunspot is spinning, and are trying to understand what that means.



November 6, 2001

SOHO's MDI shows why sunspots don't fly apart

Why do sunspots last for weeks instead of flying apart? Like huge magnets, strong magnetic fields in sunspots naturally repel each other. What holds them together?



March 30, 2000

Touching the Heart of the Solar Dynamo Periodic variations in the strength of the rotation shear at the base of the convection zone have been detected with a combination of GONG and MDI observations.


March 9, 2000

MDI Peers Through to the Otherside of the Sun Images of an active region on the far side of the Sun were derived by applying seismic holography to recent helioseismic observations from space.



May 27, 1998

Solar Flare Leaves Sun Quaking [press release 27 May 1998] - Members of the SOI Science Team analyzing MDI data have shown for the first time that solar flares produce seismic waves in the Sun's interior that closely resemble those created by earthquakes on our planet. The researchers observed a flare-generated solar quake that contained about 40,000 times the energy released in the great earthquake that devastated San Francisco in 1906.


November 5, 1997



August 28, 1997



February 14, 1997



December 17, 1996: Press Conference held at AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco

The following are news stories associated with the December 17 press conference:



December 2, 1996: First Anniversary of SOHO Launch



May 2, 1996

The first press conferences announcing SOHO scientific results were held in Paris and Washington, D.C. on 2 May 1996. Following are press releases associated with these news conferences:


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Page last revised Monday, 26-Jun-2006 13:57:33 PDT