Oct 142012
An active sunspot located just over the sun's northeastern limb exploded during the early hours of Oct. 14th. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed a bright loop of hot plasma twisting over the blast site.
The eruption hurled a coronal mass ejection into space. The cloud will not affect Earth because our planet was not in the line of fire. Future eruptions, however, might be geoeffective. The sun's rotation is about to bring the sunspot onto the Earthside of the sun where we could become targets for future flares.