Oh, Just The Sun Exploding

The Sun totally ripped one: “What you’re seeing here is a solar flare (an enormous explosion of pent-up magnetic energy) coupled with a prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface). This event blasted something like a billion tons of material away from the Sun. Note the size of it, too: while it started from a small region on the Sun’s surface, it quickly expanded into a plume easily as big as the Sun itself! I’d estimate its size at well over a million kilometers across. It looks like most of the material fell back down to the Sun’s surface; that’s common, though sometimes such an event manages to blast the material completely away into space.” We are totally on Team Sun to begin with, mostly because it’s NOT THE MOON, but this awesome display of solar flatulence makes our devotion even that much more worthwhile.