Nasa shares breathtaking photo of solar activities

Nasa has shared a breathtaking photo of the Sun that captured the star in the midst of a solar flare. It shows the Sun glowing bright orange as explosions occur on its surface releasing large amounts of energy.

“Sunny, thank you for the sunshine bouquet,” the caption of the picture, uploaded on Instagram, read.

According to Nasa, the image shows “swirling solar activities” in shades of orange and yellow with “a large jet of orange and red from the bottom left of the image”. The yellow fissures, seen in the picture, is the Sun’s surface.

“The largest object in our solar system – our Sun – keeps objects large and small in their orbit, affecting everything from planets to dust with its immense size and magnetic presence. The Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, is a dynamic place where large explosions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) occur,” wrote Nasa.

The space agency said that the CME in the photo was captured by the near-Earth Solar Dynamics Observatory in September 2012, which travelled at a speed of 900 miles per second (1,448 kilometres per second) and resulted in an aurora.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), solar flares are powerful explosions on the Sun that occur when energy stored in twisted magnetic fields gets suddenly released. During such events, solar flares heat material to many millions of degrees within a few minutes and produce a burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays.

When a CME hits the Earth, it can trigger a geomagnetic storm and in turn damage communication satellites and cause power outages on Earth.