WATCH: NASA Captures A ‘Mind-Bogglingly Gorgeous’ Solar Flare

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a solar eruption on Monday and it's beautiful

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A new video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is a breathtaking reminder of the wonders of space. The video captures a “massive filament” eruption on the sun that occurred last Friday. As Britain’s The Register so eloquently put it, it is “mind-bogglingly gorgeous.”

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The eruption stretched out a “half million miles into space,” The Register adds, and, according to NASA, the coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. Fortunately, the sun is about 93 million miles from us and, NASA adds, the eruption “did not travel directly toward Earth.”

The solar eruption wasn’t just beautiful from space. The explosion sent a wave of solar plasma toward the Earth where it reacted with our planet’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, creating an equally beautiful aurora over parts of the Northern Hemisphere last night.

Image Courtesy of David Cartier, Sr. on NASA.gov

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