The European Space Agency (EKA) has shared video footage of what appears to be a huge snake crawling across the Sun very quickly. It was captured by Solar Orbiter, a satellite launched in 2020 specifically to observe the star from a distance of just over 42 million kilometers. Anticipating the interest of people, scientists hastened to explain what got into the lens of the spacecraft.
The video captures a stream of cold plasma sliding across the Sun along a magnetic field filament. Plasma is a state of matter that is so hot that its electrons are removed, leaving an electrical charge (which, in turn, allows it to interact with magnetic fields, including those in the Sun’s atmosphere).
“The plasma flows from one side to the other, but the magnetic field is highly curved. So you get a change in direction because we’re looking down at a swirling structure,” David Long of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (UCL) in the UK, who is leading the study on the phenomenon, said in a statement.
According to the EKA, the recording was made on September 5th. Scientists admitted that the published video is greatly accelerated – in fact, the “snake” crossed the surface of the Sun for three hours. However, this does not mean that the plasma flow was slow: given the huge size of the star, it moved at a speed of about 608,330 km / h.
Source: Trash Box
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