Filament Blasts into Space

The STEREO (Ahead ) spacecraft caught a sizeable blast from a filament eruption that sent a large cloud of particles spewing into space (Dec. 6-7, 2010). The very long filament (almost a million km long) grew unstable and erupted. This event was followed within hours by another blast as well. In coronagraphs, the Sun (represented by the white circle) is blocked by a disk so that we can view faint events in the more distant solar atmosphere. This was the strongest blast STEREO has observed in several months.

• COR2_filament_expl_best.mov   
• COR2_filament_expl_1024.mov   
• COR2_filament_expl_sm.mov   
• COR2_filament_expl_1024.mpg   
• COR2_filament_expl_512.mpg   
• COR2_filament_expl.mp4   
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