Camera recorded, 1.6 million km long solar storm plasma eruption

ARIZONA – A large lump of plasma is released Sun in the form of a fiery filament, known as coronal mass ejection (CME), captured on camera by a professional astrophotographer from Arizona, United States (USA). Solar plasma eruption which is very beautiful extends into outer space at a distance of more than 1.6 million kilometers from the surface of the sun.

CME is an event where a large cloud of energetic and highly magnetic plasma erupts from the solar corona into space. These eruptions can cause radio and magnetic interference to earth.

Image taken on September 24 by professional astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy and shared the beautiful view on Reddit on September 25 on the r / space subreddit. “The biggest CME I’ve ever seen,” McCarthy wrote on Reddit.

Read also; Hurricane Sun disrupts radio communication, handling the constraints of Hurricane Ian victims

This CME is part of a minor solar storm on the G-1 scale, or the lowest category on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) geomagnetic hurricane scale. In the photo, the surface of the sun and the CME appear orange, although they are not.

The chromosphere, the lowest region of the solar atmosphere, and the CME naturally emit a type of light that appears pink and is known as hydrogen-alpha or H-alpha light. However, since the exposure time of each image is very short, the original image is almost entirely white.

McCarthy digitally added orange when compiling the final image, to provide contrast between the individual structures on the sun’s surface and to highlight the CME. However, since the rest of the image is not filtered out with orange, the sun retains a mysterious white circle that stands out against the dark background of space.

“The plasma was originally contained in a large circle connected to the surface of the sun, known as the prominence. Then it broke into pieces and flowed into space at a speed of about 161,000 km / h, ”McCarthy added.

Read also; Solar storms produce heat that approaches infernal temperatures

McCarthy explained that the photos were images that were collected over a period of time and stacked hundreds of thousands of images taken over a six-hour period. Every second between 30 and 80 individual images are captured and then stored in files that eventually reach around 800 gigabytes.