Subscribe to one of our news e-mail lists. With seasonal solar activity on the rise, the sun is beginning to put on quite a show for scientists. The prominence at one point was about 100 times wider than Earth.
Prominences are loops of magnetic fields with hot gas trapped inside.
If the magnetic fields become unstable, they sometimes erupt and rise off the sun in just a few minutes or hours, according to the SOHO Web site. Terrestrial observers can't see the solar fireworks with the naked eye, but the European Space Agency and NASA can thanks to the sun observatory, which was launched in 1995. David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center, predicts the solar activity will peak around the middle of the year 2000. Check out NASA's solar gallery. Pages will open in a new browser window External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.