Close as never before: exclusive photos of the Sun released have fascinated scientists

The Solar Orbiter was just over 77 million miles from the Sun. kilometers and had covered half the distance between the Sun and Earth.

Many of us wanted to see images of the Sun right away, but all the information needed to travel 134 million to Earth. km and then investigators to process all the information.

Here we not only have beautiful photos, you can find the entire gallery HERE, a video, but also new information about our Sun.

ESA and NASA scientists say they were surprised by what they saw in the photos sent to Solar Orbiter. They make it clear that there are brighter flares across the Sun’s surface, which scientists have called “bonfires.”

“The bonfires we are talking about here are the nephews of the sun, at least a million and perhaps a billion times smaller.” When you look at the higher resolution photos of the Sun, you can see these bonfires everywhere, they have practically covered the entire surface of the Sun, “says researcher David Berghmans, astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

Because “the Solar Orbiter itself has no way to get close, it gets closer to the Sun, giving us sharper and more detailed images of the Sun,” said ESA scientist Daniela Müller, recalling that the Solar Orbiter continues its journey toward the Sun. .

“These unprecedented images of the Sun are the closest distance from which we look at the Sun. We’ve never had those shots before,” says Holly Gilbert, a NASA scientist, and is pleased that this “allows scientists to learn more. about the layers of the solar atmosphere that are equally important and better understand how the near-Earth atmosphere and the Sun change and affect. System changes. “

“Laužai” received a lot of interest. Scientists are still not sure why they exist. Each “junk” is the size of a country. We can learn more about them in the near future, using other Solar Orbiter instruments like SPICE, which allow us to accurately measure the temperature of each scrap metal.

“So we look forward to the next (Solar Orbiter) dataset,” said Frédéric Auchère, SPICE chief operations researcher, adding that “perhaps we will discover the impact of these nano-flashes on the solar corona heating process “

ESA scientist D. Müller suggests that these “fires,” nano-flashes, can “accumulate enough energy to raise the temperature of the entire solar corona and heat the solar atmosphere.”

Solar Orbiter is a really flying laboratory. It contains not only cameras, but also many other scientific tools. In total, there are up to 10 of them in a small investigation, each of which performs a very important task and provides invaluable new information about the Sun.

The researchers say they didn’t expect anything new from the first Solar Orbiter photos sent, so they were genuinely surprised by these “bonfires.”

“It just caught our eye then. We can already see that the 10 scientific instruments in our research probe complement each other perfectly and create a holistic view of the Sun and the environment around us,” says Danielies Müller.

Scientists are pleased that the Solar Orbiter continues to successfully approach the Sun and will receive a new set of photos and new information again in the future. You are expected to learn more about the solar wind, its structures, the particles emitted during the year of the solar flare, and more.

Furthermore, the Solar Orbiter has a unique instrument that will allow you to assess the Sun’s magnetic field and especially each of its poles. They will be unprecedented data, so we will get even more interesting news about our Sun.