Recently, the European Space Agency (ESA) released a time-lapse video captured by the Solar Orbiter on Sept. 5: a colder plasma crosses the surface of the sun, forming a snake-like shape.
Plasma is a gas that ionizes at high temperatures.
The ultra-high temperature of more than a million degrees Celsius on the Sun’s surface makes all the gases in the Sun’s atmosphere plasma and highly susceptible to magnetic fields.
The “snake” is a relatively low-temperature filamentary plasma that is suspended in the hotter plasma around it by the Sun’s magnetic field.
The distortion of the magnetic field allows the detector to observe the snake-like twisting motion of the plasma from a top view.
The video was created on a time-lapse basis from images taken by the Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager.
In fact, the “snake” would take three hours to complete the journey.
But judging by the distance it travels across the Sun’s surface, the plasma needs to travel at about 170 kilometers per second.
This filamentary plasma originated in a solar active zone that later erupted during a coronal mass ejection (CME) event, and is likely a harbinger of subsequent eruptive events
And this event is one of the most intense solar energetic particle events detected by the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) to date.
