CELEBESMEDIA.ID, Makassar – The European Space Agency (ESA) and The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have succeeded in photographing the Sun with the highest resolution of a full disk, outer atmosphere and corona ever taken from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), as reported by ESA on Saturday (2/2) 4/2022).
Another image, taken by the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument represents the first full Sun image of its kind in 50 years, and by far the best, taken at Lyman-beta wavelengths from ultraviolet rays emitted by hydrogen gas.
Reported ANTARA, the image was taken when the Solar Orbiter was at a distance of about 75 million kilometers, half way between our world and its parent star. Solar Orbiter itself is an international co-operation space mission between ESA and NASA.
The EUI high-resolution telescope takes images with such a high spatial resolution that at such close distances a mosaic of 25 individual images is required to cover the entire Sun.
Images were taken one after another, the full image taken over four hours as each mosaic took about 10 minutes, including time for the spacecraft to point from one segment to the next.
In total, the final image contains more than 83 million pixels in a 9148 x 9112 pixel grid. In comparison, this image has ten times better resolution than a 4K TV screen can display.
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The EUI imaged the sun at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius.
At 2 o’clock (near the Earth image for scale) and 8 o’clock position on the edge of the Sun, dark filaments can be seen protruding from the surface. These ‘bulges’ tend to erupt, throwing large amounts of corona gas into space and creating ‘space weather’ storms.
In addition to the EUI, the SPICE instrument also records data during the crossing. These also need to be put together as a mosaic.
Close -up photo of the sun captured by ESA and NASA’s Solar Orbiter – (photo by ANTARA)
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