coronal mass ejection

watch this comet crash into the sun on lower right and the outburst on left

SpaceWeather.com says most solar physicists would likely say that a “puny comet” couldn’t set off a “coronal mass ejection” of solar particles.

But check out this video from over the weekend, when a comet struck the sun. The images were animated by Helioviewer.org, “an open-source project for the visualization of solar and heliospheric data” that is funded by the European Space Agency and NASA.