The A NASA Probe 'Touched The Sun,' And This Is What It SawIn the latest observation shared by ESA, the Solar Orbiter captured a tube-shaped eruption of plasma moving across the sun at over 100 miles per second. A time-lapse video made by piecing together images from Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager shows in seconds an event that actually took place over roughly three hours on Sept. 5, according to ESA. Its snakelike appearance is the result of cooler atmospheric gases “suspended by magnetic fields in the hotter surrounding plasma of the Sun’s atmosphere.”
Tracking Activity At The Sun’s Surface
Perspective plays an important role in how these solar phenomena appear, too. The sun is not a flat object, nor are the magnetic fields that envelop it. “You're getting plasma flowing from one side to the other but the magnetic field is really twisted,” says lead scientist David Long, from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (UCL) in the U.K. “So you're getting this change in direction because we're looking down on a twisted structure.”
Scientists with the mission also say the plasma snake may have been a precursor to another, larger eruption that occurred later on, as the two originated from the same region. Fortunately, both the Solar Orbiter and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe were in positions that allowed them to measure the events. It’s exactly these types of eruptions, called coronal mass ejections, that ESA and NASA are targeting. Every such eruption the craft are able to observe is a step toward better understanding the sun and its role in space weather — and the pictures aren’t half bad, either.
Source: ESA, ESA/Twitter