This is possibly the most amazing view of a solar eruption ever recorded. Our friends at NASA Goddard sent us this image of the latest solar eruption today — you won’t believe how ominous it looks in these detailed photos.
NASA clearly thinks it’s pretty special too, because the crazy image has been titled “Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun with Earth to Scale”, and a NASA engineer said to me privately that this was “AMAZING STUFF!”
Fortunately, it didn’t travel directly towards Earth, and satellites and communications haven’t been interrupted. According to NASA, however, it did “connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3.”
The eruption was recorded on August 31, 2012: “a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space”. NASA says that the coronal mass ejection travelled at over 1440km/s.
Here is a processed version of the same image:
And here’s the version with the entire sun disc. Click to expand it.