Cape Canaveral– A European and NASA probe has taken the closest photos ever taken of the sun, which have revealed countless little “bonfires” everywhere.
Scientists released the first images taken by the Solar Orbital Probe, launched from Cape Canaveral in February, on Thursday.
The probe was 77 million kilometers from the sun – about half way between the star and Earth – when it took the spectacular high-resolution photos last month.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is much closer to the sun than the Solar Orbital, too close for cameras to safely take photos. Its only camera points in the opposite direction to the star to observe the solar wind.
That’s why the new photos from the Solar Orbital, which show dark yellow and gray eddies – the first ones so close to the sun and on such a small scale – are so valuable. The team had to create new vocabulary to designate these little fires, said scientist Daniel Muller of the European Space Agency.
Muller said the observed crowd of “bonfires” rising toward the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, are possibly “the minor cousins of the solar flares that we already know.” They are millions, or billions, of times smaller and perhaps heat the crown, which for unknown reasons is hundreds of times hotter than the sun.
David Berghmans, of the Royal Observatory of Belgium and chief scientist of the instrument that captured the images, said they were stunned. He said his initial reaction was, “This is not possible. It can’t be that good. “
“It was much better than we expected, than we dared to expect,” said Berghmans.
Those so-called bonfires are “literally wherever we look,” Berghmans said. It is still not well known what they are, they could be mini-explosions, called nano-comrades. Further measurements are planned.
The probe will tilt its orbit as the mission continues to provide unprecedented images of the solar poles.
In two years, the Solar Orbital will be even closer to the star.
“This is just the beginning of the epic long journey of the Solar Orbital Probe,” said Muller.
The pandemic has forced project scientists to work from home for months. A few engineers can attend the control center in Darmstadt, Germany at any given time.
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