Explanation:
One of the most spectacular solar sights is an explosive flare.
In 2011 June, the Sun unleashed somewhat impressive,
medium-sized solar flare as rotation carried
active regions
of sunpots 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.
