APRIL 9, 2018
The Sun Unleashed: Monster Filament in Ultraviolet
EXPLANATION
One of the most spectacular solar sights is an explosive flare. In 2011 June, the Sun unleashed somewhat impressive, medium-sized solar flare as rotation carried active regions of sunpots toward the solar limb. That flare, though, was followed by an astounding gush of magnetized plasma—a monster filament seen erupting at the Sun’s edge in this extreme ultraviolet image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Featured here is a time-lapse video of that hours-long event showing darker, cooler plasma raining down across a broad area of the Sun’s surface, arcing along otherwise invisible magnetic field lines. An associated coronal mass ejection, a massive cloud of high energy particles, was blasted in the general direction of the Earth,and made a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetosphere.
Video Credit
NASA GSFC's Scientific Visualization Studio, Solar Dynamics Obs.
