Last weekend NASA released this footage taken by the agency’s newest sun observer, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS. The video shows a highly impressive coronal mass ejection (CME) in which giant clouds of solar material are expelled into space—kind of like a burp, but way more majestic.
Filming a CME eruption is a special feat for IRIS; the observatory has to decide what part of the sun to observe at least a day ahead of time, so capturing impressive footage like this involves a certain amount of luck. IRIS managed to immortalize a solar eruption shooting sun-stuff into space at approximately 1.5 million miles per hour, depicted in a field of view five Earths wide and seven and a half Earths tall.
(via Discover, image via NASA Goddard)
