The European Solar Orbiter spacecraft has captured the closest images ever to the sun, revealing the finest details of our star’s outer atmosphere, the corona.
Photos were taken on March 7, when orbit around the sun It was exactly half way a country and the the sunat a distance of 46 million miles (75 million kilometers) from both bodies.
One of the tools used on this occasion was the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), which sees being In the higher energy portion of the ultraviolet component of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The European Space Agency (ESA) said that due to the solar orbiter’s proximity to the sun, the EUI 25 had to take a few shots to frame the entire solar disk. in the current situation† The European Space Agency said it took the EUI team four hours to capture all the clips, with each recording taking 10 minutes, including the time it takes to reset the spacecraft.
Related: Solar orbiter spacecraft captures massive sun eruption (video)
And better photos coming soon. since spacecraft Launch in February 2020, ground control teams are gradually solidifying the path of the solar orbiter around the star at the center of our solar system. while the two were previous valley The points in the spacecraft’s elliptical orbit closest to the sun were about half the distance between the sun and Earth (47.8 million miles or 77 million km), and Solar Orbiter is now on the way to a much closer encounter.
On Saturday (March 26) at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT), the spacecraft will pass over the sun at a distance of just 30 million miles (48.3 million km), about one-third the distance between the sun and Earth, according to to the European Solar Space agency. Orbital Project deputy scientist Yiannis Zoganelis told Space.com.
The Solar Orbiter’s distance from the star will then begin to increase again, but its future narrow orbits will bring it even closer: 26 million miles (42 million km) from the sun’s surface. No other spacecraft equipped with a camera has come this close to the sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe dives deeper towards the star, even A few million miles Far away, but because of the high temperatures at those distances, the spacecraft can’t carry a camera to the sun.
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During the March 7 imaging campaign, Solar Orbiter operators also captured images using the spacecraft’s Coronal Environment Spectroscopy (SPICE) instrument, which revealed a temperature gradient across the Sun’s atmosphere. One of the star’s greatest mysteries is the strange thermal behavior of the heliosphere. Instead of getting cooler with distance, sun atmosphere At higher altitudes it is even hotter.
While the sun’s surface temperature is “just” 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,000 degrees Celsius), the temperature of the outer atmosphere, the corona, rises to nearly 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (one million degrees Celsius).
SPICE measurements revealed individual layers of the sun’s atmosphere, starting in the lowest layer, the chromosphere, at 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees Celsius), all the way to 1,130,000 degrees Fahrenheit (630,000 degrees Celsius) in parts of the corona.
In images acquired by the Solar Orbiter during its first close-pass in June 2020, scientists have discovered miniature solar flares that campfires† These fires, predicted by the recently deceased solar physicist Eugene ParkerThis could explain the mysterious heating, scientists think.
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