Although the sun has reached the minimum of its activity cycle and has been very quiet for months, even at its most quiet, the sun still can throw us a curve ball now and then. On March 8, 2019, it gave us a small solar eruption and flare. The flare — a relatively minor C1 class flare — nonetheless produced a shockwave big enough to disturb the whole solar corona. The #GOESEast Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) caught this disturbance, which solar physicists call an extreme-ultraviolet wave, and this movie shows how it bounces around in the million degree, magnetized structures in the corona. The flare also touched off a couple of small coronal mass ejections, prompting NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center to issue watches for a minor geomagnetic storm around Earth, but ultimately both disturbances narrowly missed our planet and passed harmlessly out into interplanetary space.

Animation courtesy of the National Centers for Environmental Information

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