NASA spaceweather Update (Screenshot, highlighting eruption, from Video Link below) 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. This morning, one of them erupted. The eruption 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. The Solar and Heliospheric Observary recorded the expanding cloud: movie. The CME does not appear to be heading for Earth spaceweather/images2014/16mar14/filament_anim2.gif?PHPSESSID=6f3kpbi28pdm1upjqi54b8opu0 spaceweather/
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 07:38:38 +0000