An elongated solar prominence rose up above the sun’s surface and slowly unraveled on Feb. 3, 2016, as seen in this video by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO. Prominences are clouds of solar material suspended above the sun’s surface by the solar magnetic field – the same complex magnetism that drives solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections. The solar material in the prominence streams along the sun’s magnetic field lines before it thins out and gradually breaks away from the solar surface. These images were taken in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths of 304 angstroms, a type of light that is invisible to our eyes but is colorized here in red.
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The sun appears to move in the last few seconds of the video because SDO was performing a guide telescope calibration. The still section on the right of the video is a software artifact.
Steele Hill and Sarah Frazier
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.