ABSTRACT
In 1893, Thomas Edison opened the first film studio, located in New Jersey and sporting a black exterior that earned it the name Black Maria. Sunshine played a benign role in the birth of film but it has a dark side in causing skin cancer, reflecting its violent origins. The Sun is a hellhole of heat and activity, a ball of plasma 1.4 million kilometers across where nuclear processes produce energy that keeps its interior at 15 million Kelvin. Brilliant Noise dramatically shows the Sun’s violent nature. Combining snapshots from observatories at Mt. Wilson, California, and elsewhere, it shows striking black and white time-lapse movies, from streams of charged particles leaving the solar sphere to close-ups of loops of light bigger than the Earth emitted from particles that follow magnetic lines of force. Working alone in the barren immensity, Markus Kayser focuses sunlight into an almost blindingly intense spot onto a bed of sand scooped up from the surrounding desert.
