Canyon of Fire on the Sun video link and info via NASAs spaceweather: UPDATED--ERUPTING FILAMENT CREATES A CANYON OF FIRE: For days, amateur astronomers have been monitoring two long, dark filaments of magnetism snaking around the suns southeastern limb. On March 16th, one of them became unstable and erupted. The resulting explosion split the suns atmosphere, creating a canyon of fire, shown here in a movie captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory: The glowing walls of the canyon are formed in a process closely related to that of arcade loops, which appear after many solar flares. The structure traces the original channel where the filament was suspended by magnetic forces above the stellar surface. As erupting magnetic filaments often do, this one launched a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. Update: The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory recorded a movie of the cloud expanding at 800 km/s (1.8 million mph). NOAA analysts say the CME is traveling south of the sun-Earth line and should not be geoeffective. spaceweather/images2014/16mar14/filament_anim2.gif?PHPSESSID=8bfprutcaf4oo51av3vptbbp52
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 12:39:35 +0000