Yesterday, NASA captured some really cool footage of the sun unleashing a massive solar flare, the biggest such eruption scientists have ever seen on the sun. According to Weather.com, it emitted "a spectacular coronal mass ejection. The cloud of particles covered an area of nearly half the sun's surface. A solar flare is an intense burst of radiation that can last from minutes to hours."
Scientists told National Geographic they were amazed by the event: "This totally caught us by surprise. There wasn't much going on with this spot, but as it came from behind the sun, all of the sudden there was a flare and huge ejection of particles. We've never seen a [coronal mass ejection] this enormous," said astrophysicist Phillip Chamberlin of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, one of several spacecrafts that recorded the event. Maybe the sun was just trying to rebuild the ozone layer one poof at a time? Watch two different videos of the event below:
Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait said the prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface) wasn't dangerous—but it was truly ginormous: "This event blasted something like a billion tons of material away from the Sun. Note the size of it, too: while it started from a small region on the Sun’s surface, it quickly expanded into a plume easily as big as the Sun itself! I’d estimate its size at well over a million kilometers across."
Most of the material fell back down to the Sun’s surface. Amazingly, this was only classified as a medium-sized solar flare...and yet, this was the equivalent of billions of nuclear bombs exploding. Hopefully this doesn't mean we're in store for another Nuclear Man situation, and some ill-advised Quest For Peace, in the near future. You can read more about the event at The Sun Today.
And just think: maybe this was only 10-15 percent of the sun's total expulsion. Maybe it was just making sure that all the planets around it could handle it:
