The Sun on July 1 as imaged by SOHO. Photo: NASA/ESA

A beautiful loop of magnetic energy large enough to encompass 40 Earth's, was spotted by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) last Monday. Blasting off the Sun around 9:19 a.m. EDT, the loop, or 'prominence' traps hot gas and typically reaches 107,000 degrees F - considerably cooler than the Sun's atmosphere of 1 million degrees. Scientists said that if the eruption of the prominence had been aimed toward Earth, it could have disturbed our magnetosphere resulting in auroras and other space weather activity.

One of the more interesting aspects of this sited prominence, is that we are edging toward a more tame period of the Sun's 11-year cycle. With 'solar max' occurring between 1999 and 2001, sunspot counts and solar activity have been on the decline.

The image sequence below shows how this event evolved as a coronal mass ejection (CME) cloud just minutes later as it moved in an hour and a half through the field of view of the LASCO C2 instrument on SOHO. A CME blasts billions of tons of matter at millions of miles (kilometers) per hour into space.

Photo: NASA/ESA