Image of the eruption obtained using the C2 instrument on NASA's SOHO spacecraft.
The Sun has been up to some pretty intense shenanigans lately, but a recent eruption on the far side looks to be absolute science gold.
On the evening of September 5 GMT, an enormous coronal mass ejection (CME) was recorded exploding on the far side of the Sun, sending a radiation storm out across the Solar System. It was a type known as a halo CME, in which an expanding halo of hot gas can be seen spewing out around the entire Sun.
Sometimes this means that the CME is headed straight for Earth. However, this eruption was on the far side, so it's heading away, and we won't see any of the usual effects of a solar storm here on our home planet.
But Venus was right in the path of the oncoming storm – and with it, Solar Orbiter, a space probe jointly run by the European Space Agency and NASA that is currently near Venus after a September 4 gravity assist on its mission to take closeup observations of our home star.
This has given us the rare opportunity to observe and measure a gigantic, farside CME, something that is usually rather difficult for us to do.
"This is no run-of-the-mill event. Many science papers will be studying this for years to come," solar physicist George Ho of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory told Spaceweather. READ MORE...
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