Solar snake spotted slithering across Sun’s surface
The EUI (Extreme Ultraviolet Imager) instrument on board the Solar Orbiter mission keeps on revealing new types of phenomena in the solar atmosphere. Last in date, an event nicknamed ‘the snake’ features the propagation of a bright front at 170 km/s along a twisted structure know as a ‘filament’, a tube of cool plasma maintained above the surface in the hot corona by the magnetic field.
The precise nature of the observed front remains to be elucidated, but the event is particularly interesting for it precedes, and maybe triggers, a global eruption of the solar corona observed a few moments later.
IAS is co-PI of EUI. The FSI full disk channel with which the images were acquired was developed under the responsibility of IAS.
Contact at IAS : Frédéric Auchère
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