Two Videos Of An Enormous Explosion On The Sun Today. Existence Is Fun.

The Sun unleashed an enormous explosion today, and it’s one that has to get you staggered a bit with existential glee. Seeing the engine of our existence roar in its cosmic fury gets me a bit tingly. Jump inside for videos and Phil Plait breaking them down gloriously as usual.

Bad Astronomy:

What you’re seeing here is a solar flare (an enormous explosion of pent-up magnetic energy) coupled with a prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface). 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. It looks like most of the material fell back down to the Sun’s surface; that’s common, though sometimes such an event manages to blast the material completely away into space.

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The folks at Helioviewer put together a close-up looking at even higher energy; it’s still UV but at 171 nanometers.

Follow the link above for more excellent analysis. The complexity of the cosmos in layman’s terms. Even a drooling homunculus like myself can grasp it. Sort of.