NASA has released a 40-second video that captured a grand coronal mass ejection from the surface of the Sun at the speed of 1.5 million miles per hour (2.4 kilometers per hour).
NASA has released a 40-second video that captured a grand coronal mass ejection from the surface of the Sun at the speed of 1.5 million miles per hour (2.4 kilometers per hour).
The curtain of solar material on the video is about the size of five Earths in width and seven-and-a-half of our planets in height.
The solar eruption was recorded by IRIS spacecraft (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph), launched into the orbit in June 2013 to monitor events on the surface of the Sun. According to experts, the exceptionality of the video is in its unprecedented resolution.
The new NASA observatory caught the occurrence on May 9 this year and published the video on May 30. Capturing such occurrences requires both a bit of luck and several educated guesses.
By Dinara Urazova