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Video by U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

The Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR)

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Nov. 19, 2021 | 0:05

Visible light observations of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) acquired by the Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) telescopes onboard the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission on November 19-20, 2021. The PSP and CME are located just 10 million km from the solar surface and PSP is approaching the CME from below. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) appear as vortices at the interface between the CME and the ambient solar wind. The arrows in the embedded snapshots mark the KHI. The final snapshot shows a thin line of solar plasma that remains after the deformation of the KH vortices. This is a first-of-its-kind observation of this unique phenomenon in the solar corona. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/NRL/Guillermo Stenborg and Evangelos Paouris)