Solar Superstorms

Solar Superstorms is a major new production that takes viewers into the tangle of magnetic fields and superhot plasma that vent the Sun’s rage in dramatic flares, violent solar tornadoes, and the largest eruptions in the solar system: Coronal Mass Ejections. What’s driving these strange phenomena? How will they affect planet Earth? Find the answers as we venture into the seething interior of our star. "Solar Superstorms," is a science documentary showing off the latest computation-enabled research about solar dynamics. Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, the 24-minute documentary illustrates what can happen when our closest star erupts. Stunning visualizations from Donna Cox's team at the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Advanced Visualization Laboratory tell the story. The National Science Foundation (NSF) helped fund the Centrality of Advanced Digitally Enabled Science (CADENS) project to show off the gains supercomputing and data analysis offer to science and the world. "The 'Solar Superstorms' dome show is a direct result of scientific research dependent on extremely powerful computer simulations and visualizations," says Rudolf Eigenmann, a program director at the NSF. Too complex for a single computer, producing the simulations required supercomputers from across the US: · The NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer simulated the early universe to show how the first generations of stars formed. · Pleiades at Michigan State University illustrated the magnetized convection deep in the body of the sun and the gas encircling the outer two percent of the solar mass. · The Kraken system at the National Institute for Computational Sciences visualized the convection cells across the face of the sun - each as large as a continent. · The Yellowstone supercomputer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Discover supercomputer at NASA's Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) simulated the solar corona. "The res