With solar maximum just around the corner, the Sun is putting on a show that rivals the most sizzling Hollywood thrillers. Powerful solar flares and coronal mass ejections happen almost every day. SOHO monitors solar activity from a permanent vantage point 1.5 million kilometers ahead of the Earth in a halo orbit around the L1 Lagrangian point . Unlike an Earthbound observer, it can see the Sun 24 hours a day. At maximum, the prominence was about 100 times wider than the Earth.
Prominences are loops of magnetic fields with hot gas trapped inside.
Sometimes, as the fields become unstable, the they will erupt and rise off of the Sun in just a few minutes or hours. Beautiful prominences like these become more common as we approach solar maximum. Recent work by David Hathaway, a solar physicist at the Marshall Space Flight Center, and his collaborators indicate that the solar activity will peak around the middle of the year 2000. The dotted lines above and below the solid curve line indicate the prediction curve's range of error. The sunspot maximum is usually a broad peak.