Between February 6 and 7, 2022, a huge fire vortex, many times larger than our planet, formed on the Sun. Miguel Claro (Miguel Claro), a famous astrophotographer and popularizer of science, depicted a vortex on the Sun and presented an impressive time-lapse video.

Claro filmed this event for two days. The images show how the plasma cycle moves back and forth over the solar surface. This process led to a coronal mass ejection, an event in which a cloud of solar material is powerfully ejected into outer space.

The photographer recorded 692 raw videos of 900 frames each. In total, it achieved 622,800 frames with a volume of 3 TB. Approximately 22% of these (138,400 images) were processed. The timelapse he created at 4K resolution consists of 692 videos, each the result of combining the best 200 frames from the raw video.

Claro details the size of the plasma loop it estimates by analyzing the pixels of the image. According to their calculations, the solar bulge was 10 times the size of Earth and stretched for thousands of kilometers around the visible boundary of the solar disk.

The plasma loop photo was recognized and awarded in the Our Sun category at the 2022 International Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition organized by the Royal Observatory Greenwich (ROG) in London.

This discovery not only demonstrates the size and magnitude of cosmic events, but also highlights the importance of astronomical photography in this study. Observation of such events allows scientists to better understand the nature of solar activity and its impact on both space weather and our planet.