While looking for a new desktop background at NASA’s wonderfully nerdy and fiendishly hyperlinked Astronomy Picture of the Day, I stumbled upon this, courtesy of the Solar Dynamic Observatory, mankind’s most incredible sun-watcher.The dramatic explosion was captured in ultraviolet light in the above time lapse video covering 90 minutes, where a new frame was taken every 24 seconds. The scale of the prominence is huge — the entire Earth would easily fit under the flowing curtain of hot gas. A solar prominence is channeled and sometimes held above the Sun’s surface by the Sun’s magnetic field. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) expelling hot gas into the Solar System. The energy mechanism that creates a solar prominence is still a topic of research. As the Sun progresses toward Solar Maximum. in the next few years, solar activity like eruptive prominences are expected to become more common.There’s a lot more where that came from. Because, you know, the sun should be #WINNING for a little while longer.