Early this morning (June 7, 2011) an amazingly massive and spectacular event took place on the Sun; a huge prominence eruption, marked by a solar flare and release of energetic particles. Daniel Pendick from the Geeked on Goddard blog described it as a "fountain of plasma that blasts out of the solar surface, spreads outward, and collapses to splat back down."
"I've never seen material released like this before, such a huge amount that falls back down in such a spectacular way," says Dr. C. Alex Young in the video. "It looks like someone just kicked a giant clod of dirt into the air and it fell back down." Young added that this event will probably not cause any problems as far as space weather affecting Earth.
This video is courtesy NASA Goddard's Helioviewer.org with narration by folks from The Sun Today.
Below are some still images of the event from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and (just added at 1755 UTC) a video from SDO showing the event in several different wavelengths.
These images were posted by the Camilla_SDO Twitpic feed.
© NASA / Solar Dynamics ObservatoryA huge and spectacular prominence eruption on the Sun, June 7, 2011.
© NASA/ Solar Dynamics Observatory, via CamillaSDO on Twitter.This is the peak of the M2.5 class solar flare, which propelled the plasma into space today.
The SDO science teams says: "The Sun unleashed an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare with a substantial coronal mass ejection (CME) on June 7 that is visually spectacular. The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area of almost half the solar surface."
"SDO observed the flare's peak at 1:41 AM EST. SDO recorded these images in extreme ultraviolet light and they show a very large explosion of cool gas. It is somewhat unique because at many places in the eruption there seems to be even cooler material - at temperatures less than 80,000K."
Spectacular and surprising, is it possible that something like this will not affect the Earth or surrounding?!?