What Happens When a Coronal Mass Ejection Hits Earth (VIDEO)

VIDEO: This Is What Happens When A Sun Eruption Hits Earth

As ridiculously huge balls of burning hydrogen tend to do from time-to-time, the Sun occasionally throws off huge bursts of radiation and charged particles in a coronal mass ejection (CME).

And sometimes those CMEs are thrown towards Earth.

In fact these happen all the time - and usually cause few problems on Earth except some communications interference - despite the possibility that one day they might pose a bigger problem to infrastructure.

One of the most recent occurred on 17 March, when an M1-class solar flare erupted from sunspot AR1692, which larger than our planet, and hurtled towards the Earth.

In an amazing clip Göran Strand from Östersund, Sweden, managed to show what happened next

His amazing time-lapse film captures 2464 views of the sky during the resulting aurora. It's an inspiring reminder of how small we are compared to the universe.

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