Flare Out: Massive plasma eruption from the Sun

An elongated solar filament that extended almost half the sun's visible hemisphere erupted into space on April 28-29, 2015, in a large burst of bright plasma. Filaments are unstable strands of solar material suspended above the sun by magnetic forces. Solar astronomers around the world had their eyes on this unusually large filament and kept track as it erupted. Both of the coronagraph instruments on the joint ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, show the coronal mass ejection associated with the eruption.