A striking image of our sun released this week from NASA:
After a
long solar minimum, the Sun is
no longer
so quiet.On August 1, this
extreme ultraviolet
snapshot of the Sun
from the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a
complex burst
of activity playing across the Sun’s northern hemisphere.The false-color image shows the hot
solar plasma
at temperatures ranging from 1 to 2 million
kelvins.Along with the erupting filaments and prominences,
a small(!) solar flare spawned in the active region
at the left was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection
(CME),
a billion-ton cloud of energetic particles headed for planet Earth.