Washington: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has captured a stunning phenomenon of the sun that shows a mass of plasma gathered itself into a twisting mass, spun around for a bit, then rose up and broke apart over a 10-hour period.
The US space agency NASA has produced both the image and video of the dramatic scene which ocurred on october 13, 2015, with a combination of two wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light, 193 and 304 Angstroms.
Prominences are unstable clouds of gas tethered above the surface of the sun by magnetic forces.
Though invisible to our eyes, these wavelengths are typically colorized in bronze and red, respectively, explained NASA in its official website.
Much of the jittering and odd jumping motions above the surface were artifacts caused by brightening and contrast changes used to bring out the detail and structure of the prominence.
Launched on February 11, 2010, the SDO has been investigating how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured, how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.
(Source: NASA official website)
