Coronal mass ejections
On Aug. 31, 2012, a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere erupted into space. The coronal mass ejection, captured here by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, traveled at more than 900 mps, causing auroras to appear on the night of September 3, 2012.
Producer Scott Wiessinger of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., created this lightened, blended version of the ejections using wavelengths of 304 and 171 angstroms.
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