That lucky old sun

A tweet by Brent Gohde alerted me to a spectacular, and apparently unusual solar storm that took place early Tuesday morning. A medium sized flare, the kind that usually escapes from the surface and brings "solar weather" to Earth a few days later, erupted around 1:30 a.m. Atlantic time. But the solar filament that resulted didn't quite achieve escape velocity, so it plunged back to the surface with a splash that covered half the sun's diameter. [Direct video link here] Wired Magazine reported: “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” said NASA solar physicist Jack Ireland...