From http://www.spaceweather.com/  :

REMARKABLE SOLAR ACTIVITY: In terms of solar flares, the sun is quiet today. Nevertheless, some impressive activity is underway on the sun. For one thing, an enormous wall of plasma is towering over the sun’s southeastern horizon. Stephen Ramsden of Atlanta, Georgia, took this picture on Nov. 11th:

“Solar forums all over the world are buzzing with Sun-stronomers proclaiming this to be the biggest prominence that many of them had ever witnessed,” he says.

Remarkably, though, this is not the biggest thing. A dark filament of magnetism is winding halfway around the entire sun. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture during the early hours of Nov. 14th:

From end to end, this twisted fiber of magnetism stretches more than a million km or about three times the distance between Earth and the Moon. If the filament becomes unstable, as solar filaments are prone to do, it could collapse and hit the stellar surface below, triggering a Hyder flare. No one can say if the eruption of such a sprawling structure would be Earth directed.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Science, Special Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.