NASA Releases Incredible New Footage of the Sun Spewing Stuff Into Space
Hey, at least when people watch my bodily functions, they don't have to worry about going blind.
Last weekend NASA released this footage taken by the agency’s newest sun observer, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS. The video shows a highly impressive coronal mass ejection (CME) in which giant clouds of solar material are expelled into space—kind of like a burp, but way more majestic.
Filming a CME eruption is a special feat for IRIS; the observatory has to decide what part of the sun to observe at least a day ahead of time, so capturing impressive footage like this involves a certain amount of luck. IRIS managed to immortalize a solar eruption shooting sun-stuff into space at approximately 1.5 million miles per hour, depicted in a field of view five Earths wide and seven and a half Earths tall.
(via Discover, image via NASA Goddard)
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