There have been many reports regarding various activities noticed on the surface of sun. These activities include flare-spewing sunspots to million-mile-long filaments of solar material moving with twisting motion. So, the latest activity on the closest star is reported to be a filament extending out into space in interesting way. A filament, which is a cloud of dense gas, hovers near the sun's surface.

According to NASA, this particular filament is extending 'almost half the sun's visible hemisphere'. The eruption occurred over April 28 and 29 and images and video of the event were released on May 4 by NASA. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, which is a joint NASA and European Space Agency project, worked towards this.

SOHO has many coronagraph instruments, which capture images of the sun's corona by blocking out the central bright spots of the star. The image, which has been captured, is striking, however the short video is much more interesting as it shows filament extending into space like fire released from the mouth of a dragon. By watching the video, one can easily figure out why astronomers keenly observed the activity.

Last week, the sun emitted a massive solar filament, which extended the star's visible hemisphere by nearly half. SOHO was launched in 1995. In the beginning, the spacecraft was thought to last only two years, however it is still returning solar science data.

NASA has many new sun-staring satellites in an attempt to observe activities on the star, for instance, on April 21, the space agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a video of a different eruption on the sun through the course of a six-hour period.