April 9, 2018
The atoms in your body have known many forms: star core, drifting dust, ocean mineral, living cell.
The Sun Unleashed: Monster Filament in Ultraviolet
Birthday · April 9, 2018
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APOD published April 9, 2018 · Video still. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
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.