NASA captures stunning video of a probe flying through extremely powerful Sun eruption

NASA's Sun probe has captured a stunning video of it passing through one of the Sun's most powerful eruptions ever recorded.

Parker Solar Probe's Wide Field Imagery for Solar Probe (WISPR) camera passing through a CME

The above GIF is footage captured by NASA's Parker Solar Probe, and it shows an event that took place late last year in September. The video was released by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and showcases a coronal mass ejection (CME), which is an eruption of solar plasma. CMEs can come in a variety of intensities, with most being billions of tons of plasma and shooting a wave of charged particles into a specific direction in space.

These charged particles travel at ridiculous speeds, with the Parker Solar Probe recording during this event particles accelerating "up to 840 miles per second". Recordings such as these are exactly what the Parker Solar Probe was designed for - providing critical data of solar events that are then relayed back to researchers on Earth to study patterns and, hopefully, learn more about our Sun so more accurate space weather predictions can be made.

A simulation of the Parker Solar Probe

"These interactions between CMEs and dust were theorized two decades ago, but had not been observed until Parker Solar Probe viewed a CME act like a vacuum cleaner, clearing the dust out of its path," said Guillermo Stenborg, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL)

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