On June 27, 2013 NASA launched a $120 million solar satellite aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. Pegasus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California – The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, (IRIS). After a long wait, IRIS caught its first solar flare on May 9th.
The video above shows particles exploding off the surface of the sun called a coronal mass ejection (CME). This ejection was recorded at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour according to Slate.com. The massive eruption covered enough surface area to consume a planet more than five times the size of earth.
"We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME," Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science leader at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, said in a statement from NASA via Space.com. "And then we wait and hope that we'll catch something. This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited."
These explosions occur often – multiple times in a given day even – but IRIS can only view 1% of the sun at a time which makes capturing these events very rare.