A European and NASA spacecraft has taken the closest images ever taken of the sun, revealing countless little “bonfires” burning everywhere.
Scientists released the first images taken by Solar Orbiter on Thursday, released from Cape Canaveral in February.
The orbiter was about 48 million miles (77 million km) from the sun, roughly halfway between Earth and the sun, when it took the stunning high-resolution images last month.
NASA’s Parker solar probe is flying much closer to the Sun than the Solar Orbiter, too close for cameras to safely photograph it. Its solitary camera faces the sun to observe the solar wind.
That’s why the new Solar Orbiter images showing vibrant swirls of yellow and dark smoky gray, the first images from so close and on such a small scale, are so precious. The team had to create a new vocabulary to name these little buds, said European Space Agency project scientist Daniel Muller.
Muller described the observed multitude of “bonfires” shooting toward the corona, or the corona’s outer atmosphere of the sun, as possibly “the small cousins of the solar flares we already know.” Millions, if not billions of times smaller, these little flares may be heating up the corona, he said, long known to be hundreds of times hotter than the actual solar surface for unknown reasons.
The Belgian Royal Observatory, David Berghmans, lead scientist for the instrument that captured the images, said he was impressed. He said that his first response was: “This is not possible. It can’t be that good.
“It was really much better than we expected, but what we dared to expect,” said Berghmans.
These so-called bonfires, Berghmans noted, are “literally everywhere.” It is still not well understood, it could be mini explosions or nanoflares. More measures are planned.
The $ 1.5 billion spacecraft will tilt its orbit as the mission progresses, providing unprecedented views of the Sun’s poles. This point of view will allow you to capture the first images of the solar poles.
Solar Orbiter will get even closer to the sun in two years.
“This is just the beginning of Solar Orbiter’s long epic journey,” Muller said.
The pandemic has forced Solar Orbiter scientists to work from home for months. Only a few engineers are allowed at any time within the control center in Darmstadt, Germany.
