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Massive Explosion On the Sun
Endoflow2010 sends word of an enormous eruption that occurred on the Sun this morning. Phil Plait describes it thus:
"What you’re seeing here is a solar flare (an enormous explosion of pent-up magnetic energy) coupled with a prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface). This event blasted something like a billion tons of material away from the Sun. Note the size of it, too: while it started from a small region on the Sun’s surface, it quickly expanded into a plume easily as big as the Sun itself! I’d estimate its size at well over a million kilometers across."
The attached video is well worth watching.
While I am sure you are correct that many kooks claim that. I have seen the unfortunate other side of that coin far too often. That is people claiming something can NOT work because they don't understand that a system isn't closed. They like to cry "The law of thermodynamics" and "perpetual motion" not understanding that if you stick a magnet inside of something, you have added energy. It seems that there are plenty of kooks both on the 'free energy" side as well as the pseudo-"law of thermodynamics" side that can't understand the difference between a closed system and an open one.