On April 28, 2015, a very large "prominence" erupted from the Sun, resulting in these awesome images recorded by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), and ESA/NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Eruptions like this are actually quite common, and often very beautiful. The prominence itself (also sometimes known as a "filament") is essentially a thin veil of very hot gas suspended above the solar surface by magnetic fields. Sometimes, via some process we still don't fully understand, the prominence will dramatically rip away from the solar surface and blast off into space as a "coronal mass ejection" (CME).

This particular event was not Earth-directed, so we will see few - if any - affects at Earth. Even if it had come towards us, there's no reason to believe it would have created a geomagnetic ("solar") storm at Earth that was any stronger or weaker than any other storm we see numerous times per year.

The images used here are all public data made available courtesy of NASA and ESA. Check out the SOHO ([ Ссылка ]) and SDO ([ Ссылка ]) websites for more, and follow me on Twitter ([ Ссылка ]) for the latest news about the Sun, comets, and more.

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Background music is "Space Chatter" (Doug Maxwell/Media Right Productions) - part of YouTube's Free Audio Library ([ Ссылка ])

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