I know this might be a rudimentary or obvious thing to say, but every time I look at the evening sun as it’s cascading down toward the horizon (or more precisely, as my location on Earth is rotating away from its light), I am amazed. This ball of hot plasma is not a mere 1 million miles away. Or 10 million. Or 50 million. It’s 93 million miles away from Earth. To put that into perspective, our planet’s circumference is almost 25,000 miles. To go an equivalent of 1 million miles into space, one would have to travel around Earth 40 times. To go an equivalent of 10 million miles into space, one would have to travel around Earth 400 times. To go an equivalent of 93 million miles, one would have to travel around Earth 3,720 times.

Yet, the sun still has the capacity to hurt my eyes at that distance just by peering into its hot gaze. What if we were just 5 million miles closer? Or 1 million? It’s devastatingly clear how impish we are, and how fragile, in comparison to everything else beyond our Goldilocks region.

That said, here’s NASA video of some magnetic loops coming off the Sun’s surface from Universe Today: