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Sun Fires Solar Storm Directly at Earth

By Mike Wall, Senior Writer   |   August 20, 2013 02:18pm ET

The SOHO LASCO C2 instrument captured this image of the Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME. SOHO's coronographs are able to take images of the solar corona by blocking the light coming directly from the Sun with an occulter disk. The location of the sun is indicated by the white circle. Image obtained on August 20, 2013. Credit: ESA & NASA/SOHO View full size image

The sun unleashed a powerfulstorm early Tuesday morning (Aug. 20), sending an enormous cloud of superheated particles rocketing toward Earth.
The solar eruption, known as acoronal mass ejection (CME), occurred at 4:24 a.m. EDT (0824 GMT) Tuesday and blasted billions of tons of solar particles toward Earth at a mind-boggling speed of 2 million mph (3.3 million km/h).
"Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, show that the CME left the sun at speeds of around 570 miles per second, which is a fairly typical speed for CMEs," NASA officials wrote in an update today. NASA's twin Stereo spacecraft and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, operated by NASA and the European SpaceAgency, captured photos of the solar storm from space.