NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been in operation for more than 10 years , captures an image of our star every 0.75 seconds. The AIA ( Atmospheric Imaging Assembly ) instrument captures images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light.
So what is 10 years for our 4.6 billion year old Sun? Probably very little; However, every decade that our old sun burns is a decade of turbulent changes that we can see in this new timelapse from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
In the video titled "A Decade of the Sun," astronomers collected 425 million high-definition images of the sun, taken once every 0.75 seconds between June 2, 2010 and June 1, 2020. Every second of the video represents a day in the life of the sun, and the entire decade passes in about 60 minutes.
During that decade, the sun has undergone radical changes, from sunspots reaching new maximums to the stillness of our star, in that cycle of 11 years or so in which the magnetic poles of the sun suddenly change places; the solar minimum.
These changes are difficult to detect from Earth with the naked eye, but NASA's SDO satellite sees them clearly while monitoring our star in extreme ultraviolet light . It is an impressive sight to watch.
