A fury is building on the surface of the Sun – high-velocity jets, a fiery tsunami wave that reaches 100,000 kilometers high, rising loops of electrified gas. 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 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.

The show features one of the most intensive efforts ever made to visualize the inner workings of the sun, including a series of groundbreaking scientific visualizations computed on the giant new supercomputing initiative, Blue Waters, based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois.

Brace yourself for the onslaught of the next… Solar Superstorm.

A co-production of Spitz Creative Media, NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Lab, and Thomas Lucas Productions, Inc., in association with the Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado (Boulder).
This project has been made possible with support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Film Office, and with funding by the National Science Foundation.

Running time: 24 minutes

Solar Superstorms explores related content including:

The Earth-Sun relationship
Importance of magnetic fields in space
The nature of polar auroras
Space weather and the threat to communications and power networks
Monitoring solar behavior

Now playing in 15 countries, in 10+ languages.