Another huge prominence in the sun’s northwest

 Sun news: Another huge prominence in the sun’s northwest

Posted by C. Alex Young and Raúl Cortés and Armando Caussade

July 5, 2025

July 5, 2025 A beautiful prominence on the solar northwest horizon occurred this morning July 5, starting at around 7 UTC to peak at around 9 UTC. The blast formed a closed loop the broke at the time it hurled into space chunks of plasma and magnetic field. Primarly analysis show it is too far north to come our way at Earth. GOES-19 SUVI 304 angstrom. Image via NOAA.

Sun news July 5: Another huge prominence in the sun’s northwest

(11 UTC to 11 UTC)

Today’s top story:  A huge, gorgeous prominence exploded off the sun’s northwestern horizon this morning, peaking at 8:55 UTC on July 5. It seems to have originated in the long filament in the sun’s northern hemisphere that we’ve seen for several days. That same region produced a powerful prominence a couple of days ago, too. This time, the blast started as an arch of solar plasma and magnetic fields. One of the side of the arch was close to the the sun’s northwestern limb, and the other side of the arch was on the sun’s far side, beyond the solar horizon. It was a beautiful and eye-catching event. Plasma hurled into space initially seemed to be too far north to be coming our way at Earth. But we will await on result from modeling and analysis by specialists. Stay with us for updates.

• Flare activity has been low over the past day. In the past 24 hours, the sun produced only one flare, a C1.0 flare, blasted at 11:33 UTC on July 4, from active region AR4129.
• The sun currently has five sunspot regions on the side we see from Earth. All numbered sunspot regions on the solar disk show either alpha or beta magnetic configuration. All of them appear stable or in decay.
• Blasts from the sun? No Earth-bound coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were observed in available coronagraph imagery over the past day. The huge prominence we are reporting today on the northwest limb is too far north for coming our way at Earth; nevertheless, we will wait for modeling and analysis from specialists.
• Solar wind: Solar wind speeds slowly but steadly increased from 330 km/s (738,188 mph) to a peak of 478 Km/s (1,069,000 mph) at 7:20 UTC on July 5. The speed is 440 km/s (984,251 mph) at the time of this writing. The interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) is at a low level. The north-south component (Bz) mostly south – oriented over of the period and remains so at the time of this writing. A southward Bz is more favorable for auroras.
• Earth’s magnetic field was quiet to unsettled (Kp 1 – 3 ) over the past day with one 3-hour synoptic period at Kp = 4. The Kp = 4 threshold was reached at 22:48 UTC on July 4