Scientists had never seen something like this before and it is rewriting the book on solar activity. On August 1, 2010, astronomers watched an entire hemisphere of the sun erupt, with filaments of magnetism clearly snapping and exploding, shock waves racing across the surface, and billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowing into space. Explosions on the sun, heretofore thought to be localized or isolated events, are revealed to be instead interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances.
Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections–they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem.
Watch the video at: NASA