HUMONGOUS ERUPTION: A truly gigantic explosion happened on the sun today. Magnetic fields snaking halfway across the sun's southern hemisphere erupted in tandem, producing a prominence so big, it doesn't fit inside this image from NASA's Observatory (SDO):
The blast hurled a CME into space, but the cloud does not appear to be heading for Earth.
A movie of the event, prepared by Steele Hill of the Goddard Space , shows magnetic fields in concerted motion across an expanse of solar "terrain" more than 700,000 km wide. Observations by SDO have shown that such wide-ranging eruptions are not uncommon on the sun--the great Global Eruption of August 2010 being the iconic example.
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