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Watch the Sun "burp"

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 3:50 pm Wed, Sep 5, 2012

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Check out this great NASA video showing a coronal mass ejection—a burst of plasma thrown off the surface of the Sun—from several different perspectives. It happened on August 31 and it's really gorgeous. It's also rather huge, as far as these things go. Luckily, it wasn't pointed directly at Earth. Coronal mass ejections can affect our planet's magnetic field. There's a risk of large ones screwing with everything from our electric grid to radio waves.

Read more about coronal mass ejections on Wikipedia

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE:  awesome • Science • Space • the Sun • videos

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  • Petzl

    Any time I think about how the sun is ~860,000 miles across, all I can think is, DAMN.

  • Neal Potter

    I love how impassive the greater Sun is to this, ‘no big deal, carry on’.

  • RobDobbs

    Does anyone know where these cameras are located? Was this shot from earth, or our orbit or someplace closer to the sun?

    • http://twitter.com/NelC NelC

      There’s some info on the “More info” tag: the shots are from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), which are respectively in Earth orbit, at the Sun-Earth L1 point between the Earth and the Sun, and at the Sun-Earth L5 point trailing 60° behind the Earth in its orbit. L1 and L5 are Lagrange points which are complicated to explain, so I’ll let Wikipedia do it for me.

  • http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

    The sun is one crazy bastard.

  • lavardera

    How about our probe orbiting Mercury – was that out of the way?

  • eldritch

    “Blowout soon, Stalker!”

  • Senor Schaffer

    One does not simply belch into Mordor.

  • Antinous / Moderator

    More of a shart, really.

  • bzishi

    This is nice. You can almost see the magnetic reconnection. At one point you see the plasma trapped in the magnetic field and then the switch is turned off.

  • elricky

    Interesting to note that the timescale of the actual eruption is measured not in seconds, as we experience it in the video, but in hours. NASA’s page says the movie was captured over almost 14 hours, “from noon EDT to 1:45 a.m. the next morning.”

    • euansmith

       Thanks for answering my question before I asked it.

  • enterthestory

    They missed the second part of the video: http://youtu.be/vN1SyaSdCeM

  • sccnnn

    I’m sorry, but “coronal mass ejection” has always sounded to me like something that happens when you drink too much Mexican beer.

  • lev36

    Sometimes, I think about the fact that this impossibly huge thing, the entire thing, is fusing, and it just boggles my mind.