M5 Solar Tornado

M5 Solar Tornado (On Sun)

Sunspot group AR1739, just now emerging over the sun’s northeastern limb, erupted on May 3rd, producing an M5-class solar flare and a “solar tornado.”
The explosion also hurled a bright coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. Traveling almost 1300 km/s, the electrified cloud is expected to sweep past a couple of NASA spacecraft (EPOXI and Spitzer) on May 7th. No planets, however, were in the line of fire.