Once in the while, the sun feels the need to knock us out of our seats with some beautiful display of solar flatulence. It did just that yesterday: the energy in its magnetic field erupted, sending out a solar flare that produced a twisting spire of plasma that reached the height of roughly 200,000 kilometers (120,000 miles) over the surface of the Sun. As you can see in the photos and video, it looks like a red and yellow twister on the tip of the sun, or like some lens flare effect out of the new Star Trek movie. It's another reminder that we are the residue of specks on the dirty bowl of a universe that will long outlive us—and this wasn't even close to the biggest of these kinds of expulsions!