On April 28-29, 2015 a massive filament of solar material that had been hovering in the Sun’s atmosphere erupted into space in a large burst of bright plasma.
A long solar filament erupted on the Sun on April 28-29, 2015. Image credit: ESA / NASA / SOHO.
Scientists around the world had their eyes on this unusually large filament and kept track as it erupted.
The Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 and C3 instruments aboard the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) were witness to the associated coronal mass ejection.
These coronagraphs are able to take images of the solar corona by blocking the light coming directly from the Sun with an occulter disk, creating an artificial eclipse within the instrument itself.
The first image was taken by the LASCO C2 instrument and the bottom by the LASCO C3.
The image from LASCO C2 shows the inner solar corona up to 5.25 million miles (8.4 million km) away from the Sun.
A long filament erupted on the Sun on April 28-29, 2015. Image credit: ESA / NASA / SOHO.
The LASCO C3 image has a larger field of view – it encompasses 32 diameters of the Sun.
To put this in perspective, the diameter of the image is 30 million miles (45 million km) at the distance of the Sun, or half of the diameter of the orbit of Mercury. The white circle in the center represents the size of the Sun, which is being blocked by the occulting disks.
