HONG KONG: NASA has released four movies of a filament burst arising from the Sun. The movies were assembled using observations captured in extreme ultraviolet light wavelengths by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory over a six-hour span on April 21.
Many amateur astronomers were able to observe the event as well, thanks to the plume’s immense maximum size. The fiery plume of plasma erupted from the surface of the Sun and twisted into intricate loops before most of the material collapsed back into the Sun; only some of the plume’s matter was ejected into space.
As reported by Discover, late April witnessed another major event on the Sun, as another filament erupted on April 28 and 29. In this case, a great deal of material spewed out into space in a coronal mass ejection. This phenomenon was recorded by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory; as with the earlier filament, the images have been used to produce a movie of the phenomenon. The spacecraft used the occulting disk on its Lasco C2 camera to blot out much of the Sun’s radiance and capture images of the seemingly delicate strands of ejected material.
Filaments like these originate in the photosphere and blast outwards into the hotter outer atmosphere of the Sun, the corona. Most form within a day, and some last for several months, suspended in the Sun’s magnetic field.
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