When a 200,000-mile (320,000-kilometer) filament of solar material tore through the sun last month, it cut what looks like a "canyon of fire" in our closest star, new NASA observations show.
Researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., pieced together a video of the sun's fire "canyon" of the phenomenon based on images collected on Sept. 29 and 30 by the space agency's sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory.
The sun is mainly comprised of plasma, which is a soup of charged particles that forms when gas atoms get so hot that their electrons detach. The movement of these charged particles creates intense magnetic fields, which give rise to the wispy loops and violent eruptions on the sun's surface.
(From Space.com)
