The discovery adds an exciting new feature to the Solar Orbiter mission’s zoo of parts, especially given that the snake was a precursor to a much more violent explosion. The Sun’s magnetic field has an extremely long filament that runs from one side of the Sun to the other, which the creature follows in the serpent. David Long, Mullard Space Science Laboratory (UCL), UK, said: “You get the plasma flowing from one side to the other, but the magnetic field is twisted. So you get this change of direction because we’re looking down on a twisted structure.” Images from the Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager were used to create the time-lapse movie. Taking into account the lengths required to cross the solar surface, the snake’s actual transit time was about three hours. However, given the distances, the creature must have been moving at about 170 kilometers per second. The snake’s origin in an active solar belt that then exploded and spewed billions of tons of plasma into space is what makes it so fascinating. This suggests that the serpent may have been the forerunner of this event. Solar Orbiter recorded it all using a variety of instruments. For the spacecraft’s Energetic Particle Detector (EPD), the burst was one of the most intense solar energetic particle events detected so far by the instrument. David said, “It’s a nice combination of data sets that we only get from the Solar Orbiter.” Even more interestingly, the plasma from this explosion, known as a coronal mass ejection, swept through NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, allowing its instruments to measure the contents of the explosion.
