It’s not a solar flare, it’s a solar explosion!

You’re looking at plasma dancing and twisting before it shoots off the sun.

According to NASA, the blasts are pretty common, but we haven’t been able to see it in such detail, until the Solar Dynamics Observatory started operating.

A small, hovering mass of twisted strands of plasma shifted back and forth before erupting into space (Apr. 29-30, 2014) over a period of just one day.

The plasma appears darker only because it is somewhat cooler than the surrounding material when viewed in extreme ultraviolet light.
The suspended plasma is being pulled and stretched by competing magnetic forces until something triggers the breakaway.
This kind of activity is fairly common on the Sun, but we have only been able to view them at this level of detail since SDO began operations just four years ago.

Meteorologist Chad Myers details what a solar explosion is after NASA released images of one caught on their cameras.

– Solar Dynamics Observatory/NASA.

– CNN