Pretty good day for looking at the sun today! Pretty cool prominences, including the giant one at about 4 o’clock on my photo. That one prominence is over 8 times taller than the Earth, and has a “spine” that’s spread out over an area nearly 28 times the diameter of Earth! Along with this prominence, all the other active regions on the sun are labeled in the next photo.
Prominences like this one form in “filament channels”, parts of the sun’s chaotic and twisted magnetic field, and are made of plasma that shoots out from the sun’s “surface”, called the photosphere, and extend thousands of miles into the upper solar atmosphere, a ridiculously hot region called the corona.
When prominences like this detach from the sun in a process given the very creative name of “prominence eruption” they’re known as coronal mass eruptions, or CMEs. They pose zero threat to life on earth, and even give us a treat of extra strong aurorae, but can greatly impact our electrical grid that our society relies on, in an event called a geomagnetic storm.
JML Astrophotos 