VIDEO Solar Orbiter discovers a ‘snake’ crawling around the Sun

November 14 () –

The Solar Orbiter space mission has detected a “tube” of cooler atmospheric gases meandering through the Sun’s magnetic field.

The observation provides an intriguing new addition to the zoo of features revealed by the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission, especially as the snake was a precursor to a much larger eruption, reports the European Space Agency.

The snake was seen on September 5, 2022, when Solar Orbiter was approaching the Sun for a close pass that took place on October 12. It’s a cold plasma tube suspended by magnetic fields in the surrounding plasma hottest in the Sun’s atmosphere.

Plasma is a state of matter in which a gas is so hot that its atoms begin to lose some of their outer particles, called electrons. This loss makes the gas electrically charged and therefore susceptible to magnetic fields. All the gas in the Sun’s atmosphere It’s a plasma because the temperature here is over a million degrees Celsius.

The plasma in the snake follows a particularly long filament of the Sun’s magnetic field that stretches from one side of the Sun to the other.

“The plasma flows back and forth, but the magnetic field is really twisted. So we’re getting this change of direction because we’re looking down at a twisted structure,” says David Long of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at the University College Londonwho directs the investigation of the phenomenon.

AT 170 KILOMETERS PER SECOND

A video with observation has been produced as a time-lapse from images from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager aboard Solar Orbiter. It actually took the snake around three hours to complete its journey, but given the distances involved in crossing the solar surface, that means the plasma must have been traveling at about 170 kilometers per second.

What makes the snake so intriguing is that it started out in an active solar region that then erupted, spewing billions of tons of plasma into space. This raises the possibility that the snake was some sort of precursor to this event, and Solar Orbiter captured it all on numerous instruments.

To the spacecraft’s energetic particle detector (EPD), the eruption was one of the most intense solar energetic particle events yet detected by the instrument.

“It’s a very good combination of data sets that we only get from Solar Orbiter,” says David Long. Even more intriguing is that plasma from this eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection, swept across NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which allowed their instruments to measure the content of the eruption.

Being able to see an eruption and then take samples of the expelled gases, either with its own instruments or from another spacecraft, is one of the main scientific objectives of Solar Orbiter. It will allow us to develop a better understanding of solar activity and how it creates “space weather”, that can disrupt satellites and other technology on Earth.

Solar Orbiter is an international collaborative space mission between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. It was released on February 10, 2020, and earlier this month, celebrated a thousand days in space.