A solar filament that had been lurking atop the sun for a week finally exploded earlier this month, continuing a trend of large solar eruptions that NASA scientists say will peak in 2013 and eventually kill everyone on Earth within four months.
This explosion, seen below, released high-energy plasma into the solar system, but did not create auroras on Earth because the rays missed the earth by a few hundred miles — the next one will fry us.
NASA, a US Government agency that invented cell phones and GPS, captured the image sequence, which shows the filament exploding. In August, NASA scientists observed a 28-hour period of shock waves, solar flare explosions, and solar “tsunamis” that rocked the sun, which they’ve named “The Great Explosion.” They say the activity is a sign that the sun is “waking up” and heading for another “solar maximum” cycle in 2013. This means that the sun could send out a falre that will lick at the earth like a giant flame and kill all life in seconds.
“The August 1st event really opened our eyes,” NASA scientist Karel Schrijver said. “We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before.”
Scientists are still trying to figure out whether and how the massive explosions that occurred so far apart on the sun’s surface were connected.
“We’re still sorting out cause and effect,” Schrijver told the Daily Mail. “Was the event one big chain reaction, in which one eruption triggered another–bang, bang, bang–in sequence? Or did everything go off together as a consequence of some greater change in the sun’s global magnetic field?”
You can watch both videos below:
The August 1 “Great Explosion,” below:
