Powerful Bombs and Solar Snake Appear on Surface of Sun

The sun has had an active few months, developing Ellerman bombs and solar snakes on its surface.

Sunspot AR3140 was recently seen exploding its "bombs, and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter probe spotted a cylinder of gases snaking through the sun's magnetic field in September.

Ellerman bombs occur in areas of the sun's surface with strong magnetic fields. Named after physicist Ferdinand Ellerman, who studied them in the 1900s, the bombs are magnetic explosions caused by opposite polarities colliding. While the explosions are one-millionth as powerful as normal solar flares, they are still immensely energetic, releasing as much energy as 100,000 World War II atomic bombs, according to SpaceWeather.com.

"These events are due to a combination of intense magnetic activity and pressure within the outer parts of the sun," Christopher Conselice, an astronomy professor at the University of Manchester, told Newsweek.

"The Ellerman bombs have been known about for over a century, but their origin is still being debated. We observe these as bright features on the surface of the sun, but their ultimate cause is still unknown," Conselice said.

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs)—high-energy releases of electromagnetic radiation and solar plasma, respectively—are also associated with areas of higher activity on the sun, so Ellerman bombs can represent a warning bell for more intense solar events.

"They are connected to other solar activity and can indicate that more intense solar flares and CMEs will occur," Conselice said. "The sun is a very active and ever-changing star, and we still don't know how to explain all of the physics behind the activity we see."

The solar snake that was spotted on September 5 by the Solar Orbiter is also an ejection of solar plasma, but it is suspended in a unique way by the sun's magnetic field.

"You're getting plasma flowing from one side to the other, but the magnetic field is really twisted. So you're getting this change in direction because we're looking down on a twisted structure," David Long, an astronomer at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, said in an ESA statement.

In the video, the extremely hot plasma—up to 1 million degrees Celsius—is snaking along a long filament of the sun's magnetic field. The ESA has estimated that the snake was traveling at around 170 kilometers per second, or roughly 380,000 mph.

The area that the snake emerged from later erupted in a CME, sending huge amounts of solar plasma into space. This suggests that solar snakes may also be a precursor to larger and more significant solar activities.

These solar events come as the sun inches toward its solar maximum, when it experiences more solar flares and CMEs, increasing in activity as it does. The solar activity follows approximately 11-year cycles, during the middle of which the sun reaches the solar maximum, when this activity is a lot higher than during its minimum.

The last solar minimum occurred in 2019, so our sun is ahead of schedule, being more active than it normally is at this stage in the cycle.