NASA Releases Video of Sun's Canyon of Fire

Posted on October 25, 2013

NASA released this video called "Canyon of Fire on the Sun." Visualizers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. combined two days of satellite data to create this short film. The images were captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) on September 29-30, 2013.

NASA reports that a 200,000 mile long magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September. The filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere (the corona) and left what resembles a canyon of fire. NASA notes that the sun is actually made of plasma, not fire. NASA says the plasma is "particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields."

NASA says the music used in the video is "MegaFiles" from the Stack Traxx collection by Digital Juice. Take a look:



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