The Sun Unleashed: Monster Filament in Ultraviolet

One of the most spectacular Solar System sights is an explosive Solar Flare.

In 2011 June, the Sun unleashed somewhat impressive, medium-sized solar flare as rotation carried active regions of sunspots 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.