Golden magnetic arches looping from the sun


Massive arches of solar material brighten and stream over an active region on the sun’s surface in this animation of images snapped by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on 29 September.

Active regions are areas of particularly strong and complex magnetic fields, and charged solar particles travel along the gigantic field lines above them. Earth is inset in the video for scale.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this video in the extreme ultraviolet light, which is invisible to human eyes, but has been colourised here in gold. 

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