Humans have always looked to our mother star the Sun. Over the last ten years, since the launch of the ESA/NASA solar observatory SOHO, our knowledge about the Sun has literally leapfrogged.
The most spectacular Solar phenomenon are ""coronal mass ejections ""- massive eruptions which hurl large amounts of high energy particles into space. Today, we star to know where thes originate from, and round-the clock observation of the Sun by Soho make it possible to give advance warnings of imminent storms of solar particles. The data amassed from SOHO over ten years has also helped scientis to understand why the sun's corona, it's atmosphere, can heat matter up from a fex thousand to a millon degrees. As long as we don't understand these phenomena, we don't know their possible impact on our lives.
Toda's exchange was shot at the SOHO Mission Control in Greenbelt (USA) and features SOHO results in the form of new animations as well as soundbites with ESA scientis Daniel Müller.

SOHO ñ Unravelling the Mysteries of our Sun A-Roll
10:00:40 Humans have always looked up to our mother star the Sun. Solar telescopes have been around for centuries and 44 years ago one of the very first satellites carried a solar observatory. Driven by a powerful energy source deep inside, the Sun emits energy in the form of light and energetic particles. Fortunately here on Earth we are screened from most of the dangerous parts of this radiation by our atmosphere and the Earthís magnetic field. (Images of the pyramids, followed by stills old space observatories, images of the suns changing surface, and animation of the earths magnetic field deflecting particles)
10:01:09
While the Earthís atmosphere protects us from most of the Sunís energetic radiation, it also stops us from observing the outer atmosphere of the Sun, the so-called corona. The corona emits light mainly in the ultraviolet and X-ray parts of the spectrum. To understand how this outer layer of the Sun ""works"" and why temperatures there can re