Solar Flares (IMAGE)
Caption
In March of 2015, the sun launched a coronal mass ejection -- a bubble of energized plasma traveling at about 2 million miles per hour -- toward Mars, compressing the Martian magnetosphere to around two-thirds of its normal size and pushing it inward by almost 600 miles, which exposed more of Mars' atmosphere to the solar wind's electromagnetic fields. Similar events were probably larger and more frequent early in the solar system's history, suggesting they played a significant impact on Mars over its lifetime.
Credit
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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