NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center combined two days of satellite data to release a spectacularly trippy video Thursday of a “magnetic filament of solar material” that erupted on the Sun in late September.
According to NASA, a 200,000 mile long piece of filament dislodged from the Sun and ripped through the its atmosphere, leaving an impression of a “canyon of fire” in its wake where magnetic fields formerly held the filament in place. The roiling inferno seen in the video is not fire, however: the Sun is made of plasma, which is composed of “particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields,” NASA noted.
