2.3 APOD

This is a movie of an X-Class Flare Region (X-Class fares are the biggest ones) on the sun, and of a flare erupting there over a period of four hours. These violent flares can affect satellites and astronauts. This particular flare reached over ten million degrees Celsius and was probably caused by violently unstable magnetic reconnection events above the Sun (magnetic field lines interact and splice into one another, according to Wikipedia). The movie was capture by the TRACE (Transistion Region and Coronal Explorer) satellite, which is orbiting the Sun the study the connection between magnetic lines and plasma events on the Sun.