NASA’s new solar observatory caught a gigantic solar flare on video for the first time -- and it's pretty amazing.
The coronal mass ejection (CME) was recorded by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). According to NASA, the eruption was the width of about five Earths and the height of about seven and a half Earths.
A CME occurs when a burst of hot plasma from the sun’s surface causes the acceleration of particles to flow past the sun's corona or outer atmosphere and into space. The main goal of IRIS, which launched last year, is to understand how the solar atmosphere is energized.
Capturing a solar flare with IRIS is not easy by any means. It must commit to pointing at certain areas of the sun at least one day in advance. The video below is in slow motion; the CME is actually moving at 1.5 million miles per hour.
"We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME, and then we wait and hope that we'll catch something," said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. "This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited."
CMEs have the ability to create major disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, which can mean big problems for electrical power systems.