Space
A 100,000 km high plasma wall on the surface of the Sun
An astrophotographer took this snapshot on March 9 showing the plasma falling at breakneck speed after rising from the star’s south pole.
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The plasma falls at a speed of 36,000 km/h.
Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau
It is an incredible image that the Argentinian astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau managed to take on March 9. Using specialized equipment, he managed to grab a wall of plasma descending back towards the sun after rising 100,000 km. This is almost 10 times the diameter of the Earth.
“On my computer screen, it looked like hundreds of plasma threads were dripping down a wall. It was really a show that left me speechless,” he said on his Instagram account.
These structures frequently appear in rings around the poles of the sun and are called “polar corona prominences,” explains Spaceweather.com, which clarifies that researchers still do not fully understand them. In particular, we do not know why these plasma threads descend at a speed (36,000 km/h) higher than what the ambient magnetic forces should allow. This same unexplained phenomenon occurs elsewhere in fusion reactors on Earth, frustrating the efforts of nuclear engineers to maintain an energy-producing reaction.
According ZME Science, a 2021 study found that these plasma walls have two-phase flares. The first, slow, when it begins to rise before, in a second step, accelerating to reach its peak altitude.