A huge solar filament is facing Earth today and, if it doesn't erupt, will continue to do so in the coming days. Stretched out, it would be more than 857 780 km or 533 000 miles long, which is more than 67 Earth diameters.
Image below shows this filament as seen by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) on February 10, 2015. Since SDO shows colder material as dark and hotter material as light, this snaked visible line is, in fact, an enormous swatch of colder material hovering in the Sun's atmosphere, the corona.
Filaments can float for days before disappearing, but sometimes they destabilize and erupt out in space, releasing solar material in a shower that either rains back down to the solar surface or escapes out into space, becoming a moving cloud which we know as a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME.
