While the U.S. celebrated Independence Day on July 4, the sun held its own, more powerful firework display.
The stellar fireworks came in the form of two solar storms, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that are partly directed at Earth and were observed by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) that orbits our star. CMEs can contain as much as a billion tons of plasma made up of charged particles and thus carry with them their own magnetic fields.
