Hot gases swirling on the surface of the Sun are caught in an endless dance of roiling plasma that occasionally escapes our star’s atmosphere
and gets slingshotted out into the solar system, with some of it even wreaking havoc with the Earth’s magnetic field
A filament of that plasma escaped the Sun over the weekend, leaving behind what Space Weather is referring to as a “canyon of fire,” a deep ridge over 12,000 mile deep
and ten times as long — which, for those keeping score, is more than 13,000 deeper than the Earth’s Grand Canyon
The canyon itself may soon blast fragments of radiation in the form of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward the Earth, according to space weather
Once this radiation hits our atmosphere, it could lead to a geomagnetic storm, a major disturbance in our planet’s magnetosphere