Five Hundred Nuggets

Nugget
Number:	500
1st Author:	Hugh HUDSON
2nd Author:
Published:	July 14, 2025
Next Nugget:	The Aulanier Effect
Previous Nugget:	Quasiperiodic Pulsations in the Balmer Continuum in an X-class Solar White-light Flare

Introduction

We've reached a milestone in SolarNuggets with this Nugget No. 500!

The Yohkoh Nuggets had ended in 2002 after a five-year run producing about 331 items. By 2005 the lack of Nuggets had become painful, and then Steven Christe suggested that a series of RHESSI Nuggets could just continue in the Yohkoh tradition. He set up the Wiki framework that we still use for SolarNuggets. The SolarNuggets began in 2005 with a first entry on hard X-ray spectrograms (RHESSI Nugget No. 1).

A few of the earlier Nuggets have been lost, or no longer show their images properly. This just reminds us that digital archives have shelf lives, and may wither with time much as a First Dynasty papyrus might. But most of the original RHESSI Nuggets are still available and many have interesting messages; we're probably complete as far back as Eduard Kontar's classic Dentist Mirror.

Nugget history

These Nuggets arose from the Yohkoh Nuggets which themselves began as simple tohban reports in which observers/satellite operators would report on any notable phenomena in near-real-time. The most memorable Yohkoh Nugget, among many, might have been the triple jet item, a truly remarkable thing that has never been formally published, possibly because it shows actually inexplicable observations. The Yohkoh tohban reports morphed into the more informative Yohkoh Nuggets, which ran from 1997 to 2002; an AGU poster from 2002 describing them is here as a .pdf file (authors Hudson, McKenzie, and Nitta, the triumvirate supervising Yohkoh Nugget publication in those ancient times).

How to do a SolarNugget

These articles are news-and-views opinion pages, not miniature scientific papers. Although, frequently enough, a Nugget-writer just wants to describe a journal article's great breakthrough. But any topic will do, as long as it is scientifically newsworthy, as one can see from the breadth of the topics (as linked by their icons on the home page). Here we see the last three years' worth of icons:

Nuggets present and future

There are now several other series of similar solar/heliospheric/other science-news popularizations:

Yohkoh Nuggets (1997-2002)
CESRA Nuggets (from 2006)
UKSP Nuggets(from 2010)
EIS Science Nuggets (from 2010)
HMI Nuggets (from 2014)
Planetary Science Nuggets (from 2014)
NASA GSFC Code 600 Nuggets (from 2021)
Solar Orbiter Science Nuggets (from 2024)
SHIELD Science Nuggets (recent)
...

These have different objectives, different styles, and different science specializations, but they are all great. The HMI Nuggets may be the most numerous, following the Yohkoh and RHESSI/Solar series.

To create a new SolarNugget, simply make a discovery, write a plain-text page of description, and send that along with 2-3 killer graphics, to hugh.hudson@glasgow.ac.uk. The text should be in a plain style, and have minimal academic overhead (not many references needed, since links will be added in the publication process). SolarNuggets are published twice a month. If you are ambitious to write SolarNugget No. 1000, please wait a few years...

As long as new ideas and discoveries appear, we must make them available worldwide!