'A wonderful spectacle': Photographer snaps rare solar eruption as 'magnetic noose' strangles the sun's south pole
A gigantic plume of plasma recently exploded from the sun's south pole, where solar erupt ions almost never occur. The explosion, which a photographer captured in stunning detail, is another telltale sign that the sun is about to enter its most active phase — the solar maximum . The rare phenomenon occurred on Feb. 17, when a solar flare exploded from a sunspot near the sun's south pole, releasing a gigantic column of ionized gas, or plasma, that towered around 124,300 miles (200,000 kilometers) above the solar surface — around 15 times taller than Earth, Spaceweather.com reported . The plasma eventually snapped away from the sun and hurtled into space as a gigantic cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). Astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau captured a highly detailed composite image of the plume before it broke away from the solar surface. "The plasma column was so large, I had to rotate the camera to fit it into the frame," Poupeau t...