For all its ruthless atomic power, the sun does really cute things sometimes. Other than making flowers grow and tan Kate Upton’s skin, I mean. Like this pretty good impression of a lightbulb, taken by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 instrument aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
Of course, the cute lightbulb is actually a hot-as-hell coronal mass ejection (CME) 8.4 million kilometres tall that can engulf and obliterate several Earths. Let’s just focus on how pretty it is. [NASA]