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MOLTEN
CURL
A beautiful loop of magnetic energy large enough to encompass
40 Earth's was spotted by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
(SOHO) on Monday. Blasting off the Sun around 9:19 am EDT,
the loop, or 'prominence' traps hot gas and typically reaches
107,000 degrees F - considerably cooler than the Sun's atmosphere
of 1 million degrees. Scientists said that if the eruption
of the prominence had been aimed toward Earth, it could have
disturbed our magnetosphere resulting in auroras and other
space weather activity.
One
of the more interesting aspects of this sited prominence,
is that we are edging toward a more tame period of the Sun's
11-year cycle. With 'solar max' occurring between 1999 and
2001, sunspot counts and solar activity have been on the decline.
This
image series shows how the event evolved just minutes later
as a coronal mass ejection (CME) cloud as it moved in an hour
and a half through the field of view of the Large Angle and
Spectrometric Coronagraph instrument on SOHO. A CME blasts
billions of tons of plasma at millions of miles (kilometers)
per hour into space. CMEs directed towards Earth can occasionally
disrupt satellites, and communications and power systems.
This one was not Earth-directed.
IMAGE
CREDIT: NASA and the European Space Agency
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