From Earth, the sun looks remarkably consistent, continuously bathing our planet in light and heat without much change from year to year, let alone day to day. In reality, it’s anything but calm, as this incredible NASA photo of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) shows.
A CME is a huge burst of stellar material and magnetic fields from the surface of the sun — essentially what happens when the sun “burps”. They’re often associated with solar flares, but they can happen separately, too.
This particular CME occurred on August 31 at 4.36pm Eastern Time. At its fastest, the burst shot out into space at more than 900 miles per second.
Although this particular CME did not travel directly toward Earth (God help us if it did — a CME can be very destructive to things in orbit, such as planets around the sun, it did affect Earth’s magnetosphere, creating an aurora that was visible at the time it occurred. (This post was originally published on Mashable.)