A 'tunnel' of colder atmospheric gasses winding its way through into the Sun's magnetic field has been discovered by Solar Orbiter. The discovery adds to the menagerie of characteristics discovered by the ESA-led Solar Orbiter project, especially as the snake was a forerunner to a much greater eruption.
The snake was spotted recently on the 5th of Sept. 2022, even though Solar Orbiter approached the Sun for a near flyby on 12 Oct. It is a cold plasma tube suspended by an electromagnetic field in the hotter plasma of the Sun's atmosphere.
As the European Space Agency (ESA) press release stated, plasma has become a state of matter that occurs when a gas becomes so heated that its atoms lose some of its outer particles, known as electrons.
Plasma Moving Underneath
Because of this loss, the gas becomes electrically charged and hence vulnerable to magnetic fields. Because the temperature of the Sun's atmosphere exceeds a million degrees Celsius, every gas in the atmosphere is plasma. This same plasma in the snake is pursuing an exceptionally long thread of the Sun's magnetic field that extends from one side to the other of the Sun.
Phys report added that the plasma is moving from one side to the other, yet the magnetism is very distorted. Therefore, it's getting such a shift in direction because astronomers are gazing down on a twisted structure, as explained by David Long, Mullard Space Science Laboratory (UCL), UK, who is currently in charge of the project.
The video was created as a time-lapse using photos from the Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. In actuality, the snake took approximately three hours to make its voyage, but given the complexity involved in traversing the solar surface, the plasma should have been traveling at roughly 170 kilometers per second.
Something that makes the snake so remarkable is that it evolved from a solar active zone that subsequently exploded, expelling billions of tons of plasma into orbit. This increases the likelihood that the snake has been a forerunner to this event, and Solar Orbiter captured it all in many sensors.
Fascinating Coronal Mass Ejections
Even more fascinating, the plasma from this outburst, characterized as a coronal mass ejection, managed to wash over NASA's Parker Solar Probe, permitting its detectors to examine the contents of the explosion.
One of Solar Orbiter's primary scientific goals is to be able to see an event and subsequently analyze the ejected gasses with its equipment or those of other missions. It will enable a better understanding of solar activity and how it produces space weather,' which may impair satellites and other electronics on Earth. The Solar Orbiter is an international space project operated by ESA and NASA. The IFL Science report also mentioned that it went live on February 10, 2020, and completed its 1000th day in space earlier this month.
The Solar Orbiter's course took the spacecraft within 48 million kilometers of the Sun on March 26, according to a report. This equates to less than one-third of the journey between Earth and the Sun - and is the mission's preliminary high point. Only three spacecraft have ever approached the Sun - none of them through imaging sensors aimed at our star. Solar Orbiter, on the other hand, employs six pieces of scientific equipment to examine the Sun's surface, atmosphere, and environs; four more, known as in situ instruments, analyze the particles and magnetic waves that flow about the spacecraft.
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