14 DAY TRIAL // A sizeable solar flare shot off material into space which is now headed our way and should reach Earth in the next few days. But this is just a minor incident, especially since we're supposed to be seeing the peak activity in the sun's 11-year cycle.
A few weeks back though, the sun did put on quite a spectacle. Up until that point, it had been very quiet, particularly for this period.
"A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion," NASA explained.
"The 200,000 mile [320,000 km] long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion," it added.
NASA put together a video from footage shot over the two days and the end result looks spectacular no matter the wavelength. The event stretched across a big chunk of the sun and expunged quite a lot of material.
"The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F [50,000° C ] and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt," NASA explained.
"The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F [555,537° C], are useful for observing material coursing along the sun's magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption," it added.
"The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F [1,000,000° C], and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious."