NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captures a stunning photograph of solar plasma filament, stretching halfway across the sun: a distance nearly equal to 50 Earths put end-to-end in a row. The Titanic solar snake divided the Sun into two hemispheres, which was shown in colorized image taken by SDO in Oct. 21,2015. The previous giant filament was seen towards the end of 2014.
NASA is the most curious eye on the skywatch, looking for the behavior of nature outside the Earth. A week ago, its Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been tipping us with spectacular photographs of the sun, recorded a 50-Earth long snake formed out of solar material at the hands of star's strong magnetic forces. Based on the space agency's calculations, the giant filament must have been disintegrated by now, because they rarely last longer than a week.
Solar filaments are actually nothing but the stuff our Sun is made of: Plasma, which rises above the surface of the Sun as a mass of plasma clouds, which are further manipulated by Sun's strong magnetic fields into a zigzagging snake. Since these filaments are less bright than rest of the sun, the SDO's picture, taken at ultraviolet wavelengths of 193 angstroms, are colored bronze to make it visible.
Breaking down the 50-Earth wide filament into numbers for the sake of math-savvy individuals, Sun's diameter is about 865,938 miles while that of the Earth is 7,900 miles. If the filament is half the size of Sun's Diameter, which is 432,969 miles, then dividing this number by Earth's diameter gives us 54.8. That is almost 55 Earths! Yet, this is not the longest solar filament we have ever seen.
Back in 2014 NASA observed almost a million-mile long filament, also recorded by the same observatory. To save you the trouble, that makes 126 Earth diameters. As mentioned earlier, Solar filaments have a very short lifespan and they usually disintegrate within a week, while little filaments go unnoticed on the media, the huge filaments make the news.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched on 11 February 2010 with the sole purpose of observing activities of the Sun. The Observatory is a part of Living With a Star (LWS) program which struggles to understand Earth-Sun relationship. The latest image of the giant 50-Earth long filament adds another incredible photo to the SDO's gallery of Sun Photography that gives us deeper insight into our home star.