A massive filament of plasma was explosively ejected from the Sun’s surface on July 15, leaving behind a “canyon of fire” on the Sun’s surface that spans 250,000 miles (over 402,000 kilometers).
As Space reports, the extravagant plasma ejection, which unleashed a coronal mass ejection (CME) out into space, was captured in exquisite detail by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
NASA’s videos show how the filament, which NASA describes as “dark, thread-like features seen in the red light of hydrogen (H-alpha). These are dense, somewhat cooler, clouds of material that are suspended above the solar surface by loops in the magnetic field.”
When these filaments erupt, as they spectacularly did yesterday, they routinely launch significant amounts of solar material into space, which can sometimes lead to coronal mass ejections. These can sometimes strike Earth’s atmosphere, occasionally leading to brilliant auroras.
The filament that erupted from the Sun this week was especially powerful, leaving in its wake a 250,000-mile-long trench of super-hot, glowing plasma. To put the length of that “canyon of fire” into context, the Earth is less than 240,000 miles from the Moon. It’s a big scar on the Sun’s atmosphere.
Spaceweather.com, an essential resource for space weather enthusiasts and aurora-hunting photographers, explains that the canyon left behind on the Sun could have walls of plasma as tall as 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers.
The “fiery chasm,” as Space describes it, results from the Sun’s powerful magnetic field violently realigning following an eruption.
When a 200,000-mile-long filament erupted on the Sun in 2013, NASA explained: “The 200,000-mile-long filament ripped through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion.”
Once the filament erupts, the Sun quickly reacts, and its magnetic field brings the remaining plasma back into order, albeit with an altered appearance.
Here is the CME in LASCO C2 (left) and CCOR-1 (right) which has a later frame of the CME further spread out. The front is traveling pretty slowly and away from Earth. pic.twitter.com/ljWWmThpGQ
— Vincent Ledvina (@Vincent_Ledvina) July 15, 2025
The eruption is not only beautiful, but it may also be a boon for astrophotographers. Aurora chaser and expert Vincent Ledvine says on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the CME resulting from the filament eruption is headed toward Earth. To check if auroras are in the offing, photographers should monitor Spaceweather.com and the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
Image credits: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)