There haven't been any strong solar flares in days. Nevertheless, some impressive activity is underway on the sun. For one thing, an enormous wall of plasma is towering over the sun's southeastern horizon. Stephen Ramsden of Atlanta, Georgia, took this picture on Nov. 11th:
© Stephen W. RamsdenImage taken: Nov. 12, 2011
Location: Atlanta, GA
"Solar forums all over the world are buzzing with Sun-astronomers proclaiming this to be the biggest prominence that many of them had ever witnessed," he says.
Remarkably, though, this is not the biggest thing. A dark filament of magnetism is snaking more than halfway around the entire sun:
SDO image. From end to end, it stretches more than a million km or about three times the distance between Earth and the Moon. If the filament becomes unstable, as solar filaments are prone to do, it could collapse and hit the stellar surface below, triggering a
Hyder flare. No one can say if the eruption of such a sprawling structure would be Earth directed.
"I cant help but wonder what could possibly come next since we are still over a year away from the forecasted Solar Maximum," adds Ramsden. "There's never been a better time to own a solar telescope than now!"
Comment: The above video is not the BBC's of course, it's taken from this YouTube channel.
We think that image is far too grainy to tell if we're looking at 'a structure' (in the sense that it's 'unnatural').
The narrator does make a good point however about the poor quality images they made available to the public. They can take fabulous photographs of other galaxies, but can't do better than this for "the closest asteroid fly-by in 200 years"?
It could be that by "strange structures", they meant naturally occurring structures they weren't expecting to see, such as the clear signs of electrical arc discharges on comets Wild 2 and Tempel 1 (which completely discounted the 'dirty snowball' theory of comets, by the way).
Then there's this:
Asteroid Vesta Has Mountain Three Times as Tall as Everest
And then, if we put our conspiracy-minded hats on for a minute, it could be that they're deliberately feeding the 'comets and space rocks as UFOs and motherships' disinformation.