Last week the sun cast a giant thread of sun – a gigantic burst of hot plasma – and a satellite was in just the right place to put it on tape.
The sun sometimes releases large, bright gaseous features, often in a loop shape. When a celebrity is viewed from a different perspective, so that it is facing the sun rather than the room, it will appear darker than the surrounding background. This formation is instead called the sun thread. In other words, solar filaments are unstable strands of plasma that are pushed out of the sun by strong magnetic fields. and they can get really big as you can see below:
This, in particular, was so large that NASA said it expanded “almost half of the Sun’s visible hemisphere”. The outbreak occurred on April 28th, but NASA released pictures and videos of the event yesterday, May 4th. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency, had a front-row seat for the action.
The image was taken with the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph on board SOHO. The block colored annulus is used to block the intense light on the sun’s surface and capture the image in more detail.
“To put this in perspective, the images are 45 million kilometers (about 30 million miles) away from the Sun, or half the diameter of Mercury’s orbit. The white circle in the center of the circular disk represents the size of the sun, which the telescope is blocking to see the weaker material around it, ”NASA said in a press release.
Source: NASA.
