The Doctor of Sciences spoke about the nature of the prominences and their safety for the Earth.

Prominences are large clouds of incandescent plasma held in place by the Sun's magnetic field. Even the largest of them are not comparable to the distance to Earth and are much weaker than solar flares, which pose the main potential threat. Therefore, prominences remain mostly a spectacular but safe phenomenon. This was stated to Izvestia on November 20 by Honorary Doctor of Sciences, educator, teacher Sergey Chumakov.

"A prominence is a giant cloud of incandescent plasma, that is, an electrically charged gas that rises and is held above the surface of the Sun by its own magnetic field. They can be of different sizes and shapes, but they mostly look like giant arcs, arches, and something like that. Such events can be predicted, but in a limited time interval, because changes in the Sun's magnetic field, which occurs inside the star itself, lead to the formation of prominences, and here we do not yet have all the information about the ongoing processes," the expert said.

At the same time, as Chumakov emphasizes, even the separation of the prominence does not mean the subsequent occurrence of a magnetic storm on Earth. According to him, the plasma of such formations cools down quickly, dissipates in interplanetary space and has practically no chance of reaching our planet. The interlocutor clarified that the size of even the largest prominences is disproportionately small compared to the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and their energy is significantly inferior to the energy of solar flares. Therefore, it is not necessary to expect that such phenomena will cause strong magnetic storms, even if dozens or hundreds of prominences are simultaneously observed on the Sun.

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On the same day, the press service of the Laboratory of Solar Astronomy of the IKI RAS reported that the tsar prominence, which exceeds 80 times the size of the Earth, broke away from the Sun on the night of November 20. The size of the plasma formation at the moment of separation from the star exceeded 1 million km. At the same time, there is no information about the processes that contributed to this phenomenon due to the fact that their source was located on the far side of the Sun, in an invisible zone for observations.

All important news is on the Izvestia channel in the MAX messenger.