In the Dark

Check out this dramatic and slightly alarming picture of a huge filament emanating from the surface of the Sun, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The filament is about 700,000km long, apparently – that’s an entire Solar Radius. It’s expected to collapse back into the Sun at some point, an event which should be rather exciting! For more details see here.

Even better, here’s a close-up animation.

It reminds me a bit of that Balrog thing in The Lord of the Rings that gave Gandalf such a good run for his money.

This entry was posted on December 6, 2010 at 6:46 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags filament, NASA, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Sun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.