Solar Corona
the Sun in NASA gold, slowly turning

What you see on every new tab

Solar Corona puts the whole Sun in the middle of the New Tab page, about four-fifths of the screen height across, in the gold-on-black colours of NASA SDO's 171 Å images. Its north pole is tipped slightly toward you, and it turns once every 475 seconds at the equator while the poles lag behind.

What sets it apart is the magnetic field: about 650 glowing lines loop over the surface, from tall arcades over the sunspot groups to a carpet of small loops.

• Boiling surface: Dark plasma churns in place, laced with bright fibrils, fine granulation and gold moss fanning out around six sunspot groups with dark cores, three in each hemisphere.
• The field lines: 180 loops rooted in the sunspot groups, 14 long links between groups, 60 open lines off the poles and 400 small loops, drawn as soft ribbons with pulses of light running along them.
• Patchy corona: The glow beyond the edge is not an even halo: streaky fans bloom where a sunspot group turns onto the limb, and empty stretches of edge go almost black.
• Small flares: Every 5 to 14 seconds a random group brightens briefly on its own.
• Eruptions: Every 40 seconds to two minutes, a prominence lifts off the edge above a group near the limb, widening as it climbs, and is gone within 10 seconds.

Two passes: a fragment shader hits a sphere for each pixel and builds the surface and corona from 3D noise, then the field lines are drawn as thin triangle ribbons shaped in the vertex shader, using the same rotation so they stay rooted.

What it reacts to

• Mouse: Field lines near the cursor bend toward it, tall loops most of all, and the surface under it glows hotter.
• Music: With music sync on, bass brightens the corona and the disc, mids brighten the field lines, and treble sharpens the granulation and makes bright stars flicker.
• Sound: The Sun's real vibrations, measured by the SOHO spacecraft and turned into sound by NASA and Stanford; rest your pointer on the Sun and its hum swells under it. Sound starts soft on a new install, and you can turn it down or off right on the New Tab.
• Beat: Each kick fires a flare in the next sunspot group: the patch turns white, its loops blaze and their pulses race. A very hard kick with heavy bass can also launch an eruption, at most once every 8 seconds.
• Night: After dusk on Auto, or in Night mode, a dark veil of up to 60 percent dims the gold.

Free or Pro?Pro

Ambient New Tab is free to install, with five free themes. Solar Corona is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever, and it unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as we release it. You can preview Solar Corona full screen before you buy: open the Themes panel and rest your mouse on it. Changed your mind? 14-day refund, no questions.

How to get it

1. Add Ambient New Tab to Chrome.
2. Open a new tab and click the Themes pill in the bottom-right corner.
3. Pick Solar Corona. Done.

Questions

What are the glowing lines around the Sun?

They stand for the Sun's magnetic field, which hot plasma traces in SDO's 171 Å channel. Closed loops arch over each sunspot group, longer loops join neighbouring groups, small loops cover the whole surface and open lines stream away from the poles. They turn with the surface, so each loop stays over its group.

Is Solar Corona free?

It is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever. It unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as it is released.

Does the real Sun rotate like this?

In the same way, only much faster. The real Sun takes about 25 days to turn at the equator and longer near the poles. Here the equator takes 475 seconds and the poles turn 28 percent slower, so features at different latitudes slowly drift apart, as they do on the real Sun.

How is Solar Corona different from The Sun?

Solar Corona shows the whole disc in gold with its magnetic field lines, the 171 Å view. The Sun is a 304 Å view in red, orange and white: a huge close-up of the edge rising from the bottom-left corner, with no field lines but with prominences, a fringe of spicules and slow flares.

Does it work on my phone?

No. It's a desktop browser extension for Chrome on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. If you're reading this on a phone, send yourself the link.

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