Double Eruptive Prominences
Lofted over the Sun on looping magnetic fields, large solar prominences are composed of relatively cool, dense plasma . When seen against the brilliant solar disk they appear as dark filaments , but these enormous magnetic structures are bright themselves when viewed against the blackness of space as they arc above the Sun's edge. In a rare visual treat , these two solar prominences arising from the Sun's southern (lower) hemisphere were captured in extreme ultraviolet light by the EIT camera on board the space-based SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on March 21. For scale , the pair of plasma loops stretch above the Sun to a height of about twenty times the diameter of planet Earth. In a matter of hours, these prominences apparently erupted away from the Sun's surface and may have been associated with a flare and coronal mass ejection .