crazychemgirl
C.S.I.S&S
- Joined
- Jul 9, 2012
- Posts
- 35,776
The sun unleashed a powerful storm early Tuesday morning (Aug. 20), sending an enormous cloud of superheated particles rocketing toward Earth.
The solar eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), occurred at 4:24 a.m. EDT (0824 GMT) Tuesday and blasted billions of tons of solar particles toward Earth at a mind-boggling speed of 2 million mph (3.3 million km/h).
"Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, show that the CME left the sun at speeds of around 570 miles per second, which is a fairly typical speed for CMEs," NASA officials wrote in an update today. NASA's twin Stereo spacecraft and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, captured photos of the solar storm from space.
- read the full article Sun Fires Solar Storm Directly at Earth (from space.com)
very cool... or hot, rather.