You’ve seen it smile, now check out fiery snake slithering across the Sun’s surface, as captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Solar Orbiter. It was spotted on September 5, 2022 as Solar Orbiter and the snake-like object you see is actualla a tube of cool plasma suspended by magnetic fields in the hotter surrounding plasma of the Sun’s atmosphere.
Plasma is essentially a state of matter in which a gas is so hot that its atoms begin to lose some of their outer particles, called electrons, and this snake is following a particularly long filament of the Sun’s magnetic field that is reaching from one side to another. What you’re looking at is a time-lapse using images from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager onboard Solar Orbiter.
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You’re getting plasma flowing from one side to the other but the magnetic field is really twisted. So you’re getting this change in direction because we’re looking down on a twisted structure,” said David Long, Mullard Space Science Laboratory (UCL), UK.
