The switchbacks have been detected before, but never seen.
Such switchbacks have previously been hypothesized, as other spacecraft including
NASA's Parker Solar Probe, for example, periodically dives to within only a few million miles of the sun's surface. But the temperature in this area is so hot that no existing camera technologies could survive the dive.
"I would say that this first image of a magnetic switchback in the solar corona has revealed the mystery of their origin," Daniele Telloni, a solar physicist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Torino, Italy, said in aTelloni was the one who first spotted the structure in the data captured by METIS on March 25, only a few days before Solar Orbiter's closest approach to the sun to date.