A question about sun proms.

I'll post this here as not to distract attention away from the great pics you guys are posting of the sun.

When you see a prom................how long does it actually last?

I'm gonna hazard a guess of 8 mins (as seen from earth) because of the time the light from the sun takes to arrive here. I know they are fairly quick burts of energy on the sun itself...................lasting what? a few seconds?

But wouldnt it take 8 mins for the image (as we see it) to change because of the delay in time?

I know sun spots can last minutes or hours.......................would proms last this long?

A good eruptive and violent promenince will last no more than a few hours to 'escape' from the sun. Some will last a few days as they are held by the local magnetic fields that help create them.

Seanie.

They can last THAT long?

I had no idea.

Thanks for enlightening me.

No problem. Also, things like them cannot be predicted at all, or forecasted hw long they last when seen... pre-empting your next strike!

Ohhh i know they are completely random and unpredictable.

I'm guessing sunspots are also....................so how come sunspots are assigned numbers?

Do they just get given a sequencial number as they appear following on from the previous one?

They can last quite a long time but only appear to us as proms for hours at a time up to maybe a day? The thing is that they only appear as proms to us when they are very close to the edge of the disc. If they are on the disc itself they appear as dark filaments but we can't detect that they are above the surface because of our position.

I remember the very first prom I saw was also the largest back in 2006. It extended maybe about a 1/4 of the Sun's diameter. You should have seen the images that Soho made of that prom :shock:

By the way, this is a really cool page showing the different types of proms, flares, etc. The "surge prom" image is really incredible.

www.prairieastronomyclub.org/halpha/