NASA's solar orbiter captured an enormous eruption from the sun today, Space.com reports.
The "beautiful prominence eruption" occurred at 1:45 p.m. ET and was captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Although visually spectacular, the resulting solar flare registered only in the middle of the intensity scale (M1.7 class).
No danger to Earth, however. The burst of super-hot plasma, called a coronal mass ejection, went in another direction. But the sun is in an active stage of its 11-year cycle, which is expected to peak next year.(copied from USA Today website)
This actually occurred a couple days ago.
(video from NASA website)
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4 comments:
Anybody got a Solar Sail? That "little" burst could send you into deep space at some pretty fantastic speeds (The solar wind averages 6.7 billion tons per hour at 520 km/s with "slow" low energy coronal ejections reaching 400 km/s and "fast," higher energy ejections averaging 750 km/s.), if only you could get close enough to the sun at the start!
Very cool, thanks for posting!
WOW!
hot tamales!
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