Solar Flare Eruption Recorded By NASA (VIDEO)

A large and stunning solar flare was captured on camera by NASA this past week. According to the BBC, the eruption lasted about 90 minutes, and was the latest in a series of sunstorms.

NASA caught the flare in extreme ultraviolet light, using high definition and a cadence of a frame taken every 24 seconds, making the sense of motion appear seamless. The eruptions created a "tendril of plasma" (a solar prominence), which can be seen in the video.

Earlier this month, massive solar flares threatened to disrupt power grids and communication systems on Earth. But this most recent flare was not aimed at earth, and thus was not considered a threat to satellites or other systems. Fortunately for Earthlings, this week the solar flare just made for an awesome video.

WATCH the eye-popping solar flare:

Comments

[CharlieVer]

10:47 AM on 03/18/2011

Gee, I hope the camera crews get back from the sun okay. It must be really hot where they are!

[AquarianLady]

09:42 AM on 03/03/2011

Awesome and freightening. Some may joke but if the sun belches out a huge solar flare or several flares that reach earth it won't be a joke.......or, the jokes on us.

[Jim Shaffer]

04:22 AM on 03/03/2011

Oh yeah "Ooh, aah", that's how it always starts. But then there's running and screaming.

[MichaelMcKLA]

07:07 PM on 03/02/2011

Wow. Impressive. A big, fat, violent eruption of extreme temperature matter. Of course, I immediately associated this video with Rotund Rushbo.

[SiriusMrE]

04:14 PM on 03/02/2011

Beautiful images.

"It is obvious from looking at powerful mass expulsion activity in active stars and galaxies that gravitational models are inadequate to explain what is going on. Gravity is an attractive force only. Recourse to magnetic field behavior magically divorced from electric currents serves merely to reinforce the mystical quality of modern physics without telling us anything about the true cause."
THE SUN: Our Variable Star: http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=by2r22xg

[palindrom]

09:06 PM on 03/02/2011

Hello again Sirius!

I'll never convince you -- that's impossible! -- but let me point out, for the benefit of other readers, that the holoscience/Electric Sun model that Sirius is linking here is thought to be wildly wrong by the entire astrophysics and solar physics community. This will no doubt generate an indignant response, but it's simply true.

There's an enthusiastic community of believers out there, and a few of them have some scientific or engineering training, but the reality-based community finds the basic ideas to be completely unsupportable.

[rjhuntington]

11:45 AM on 03/03/2011

Here's something an electrical engineer knows very well: Every magnetic field is an effect of an electric current. The more massive the magnetic field, the more electric current is involved. The humongous magnetic prominences produced by stars clearly indicate commensurate electric currents.

Thee are no magnetic fields without electric currents. The magnetic fields are proportional to the electric current. You cannot have one without the other. The repulsive force of electromagnetism is 39 orders of magnitude (multiple by a 10 followed by 39 zeros) more powerful than the attractive force of gravity.

This electric sun adherent has the requisite electrical engineering training to understand and recognize the validity of the science.

[Nelle]

02:40 PM on 03/02/2011

There are some people I'd really like to toss in there.

[DeadPhish]

11:13 AM on 03/02/2011

Here it comes...R-A-P-T-U-R-E....not by Blondie.

http://www.wecanknow.com/

[LeFlaneur]

11:07 PM on 03/01/2011

You've killed entire watersheds, turned rivers into concrete slaps, blown entire mountains away, reduced great stretches of desert into radioactive dumps ...

You've taken 90% of it already. You don't get all of it. You can't have all of it.

[LeFlaneur]

11:09 PM on 03/01/2011

Sorry for the mis-post. Must have bumped an arrow key. Most annoying feature on this site.

[chickenflu4]

10:20 PM on 03/01/2011

what?? only one frame per 24 secs? my lab camera takes 100,000 frames per second! nasa is way behind!!

[palindrom]

07:06 AM on 03/02/2011

I know you're being funny, but there's the small matter of getting all that data down from space -- telemetry is surprisingly limited.

[Lance Callas]

09:37 PM on 03/01/2011

suns dying out.... 2012 looking more promising, going to tomorrow to quit my job sell my house and cash out all my stocks and 401k, should give me enough for a wild charlie sheen style partying for the rest of the year, travel the world, and enjoy the few months left! first stop mardi gras!!!

[scorpioman]

08:37 PM on 03/01/2011

get ready for the REALLY big one Dec. 2012

[pita143]

08:46 PM on 03/01/2011

Wow, someone else agrees with me. Have you read Galactic Tsunami by David L. Souers? You can get it for FREE on the net, just do a search.

Fanned...thank you.

[fumes]

07:03 PM on 03/01/2011

doesn't hold a candle..

to what a trace gas can do!

[palindrom]

07:02 AM on 03/02/2011

Well, when it comes to effects local to the earth, that's actually true.

This flare is visually spectacular, but it involves only a small fraction of the sun's total luminosity. CO2 acts as a valve that affects how easily the power intercepted by earth can be re-radiated into space.

[onlythetruthcounts]

04:40 PM on 03/01/2011

Or it could be a zoomy pic of charcoal burning in someone's grill.

[StephenJK]

08:00 PM on 03/01/2011

actually, you might be on to something with that analogy.....even though you might think light-heartedly about tit....The universe, when you look at it from the bottom up (meaning sub-atomic), it appears that everything is part of a giant fractal....up to and including humanity.

[StephenJK]

03:20 PM on 03/01/2011

An amazing display of energy. I would like to understand the force of these ejections, how they create that force and the physics behind such an interaction. The next step, since we understand how to harness the earths forces for energy production, is to understand how the sun recycles it's energy. Then we can realize our energy potentials. What we are relying on at this point is purely caveman technologies, relatively speaking. But, in order for humanity to realize these potentialities, we have to dispatch capitalism/consumerism. In this paradigm, the earth, eventually, will be destroyed to the point of uninhabitability. The resources will become too depleted. Nature might help us get away from it. That is my prayer.

[alvdh1]

06:09 PM on 03/01/2011

Photons traveling from the Sun's core and the Sun's magnetic field - which in part is creating the magnetic field. Photons can take thousands of years to reach the Sun's surface as they bounce off of protons enroute to the surface. From there, it takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth. The solar flares are launched above the surface for thousands of miles. Some magnetic loops are large enough for the Earth to pass through without touching the sides.

[StephenJK]

07:52 PM on 03/01/2011

I think those ejections are actually approaching, if not exceeding, a million miles, no? Considering the radius of the sun is about half a million miles, some of these ejections look like their exceeding that radius (meaning if you were to extend them inward in an opposite fashion, they would reach through the center of the sun). Then you consider the gravity of the sun. These ejections have the force we've not even come close to realizing. The size of these things are mind boggling. Hundreds of earths are able to fit into these "filaments". That should give you an idea of the force required to eject such massive amounts of material.

[HowthCastle]

07:50 PM on 03/01/2011

The sun does not recycle its energy. It produces energy from nuclear fusion, just as does a hydrogen bomb. Eventually, some billions of years in the future, the hydrogen will run out. Then the sun will swell up, engulfing the earth and become a red giant. Billions of years later, it will shed its outer layers, forming a glowing cloud--a nebula--while the core shines on from residual heat, as a white dwarf. Eventually, even that energy will be gone, leaving a black dwarf.

[tuckgraph]

03:10 PM on 03/01/2011

Looks like cotton candy being made.