Death Star Sucks Plasma from the Sun!

MSNBC carries the real story:

The footage, a composite of images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and processed by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has quickly garnered attention on YouTube, where viewers are suggesting it shows a UFO spacecraft refueling by sucking up solar plasma, or at the very least, the birth of a new planet.

However, according to NASA scientists, the feature is actually a little-understood, but frequently observed, type of solar activity called a “prominence,” and the way it is situated beneath another solar feature gives it its otherworldly appearance.

The thread extending from the lower left edge of the sun in the video is known as a “prominence,” a feature containing cooler, denser plasma than the surrounding 3.5 million-degree Fahrenheit corona, said Joseph Gurman, project scientist in the Solar Physics Laboratory at NASA Goddard. It isn’t yet known exactly how prominences develop, but these dense plasma loops can extend from the sun’s surface thousands of miles into space.