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The mosaic image packed with 83 million pixels provides a great view of the Sun and its turbulent outer atmosphere.
The Solar Orbiter took about four hours to capture all 25 images consisting of mosaicthat shows the sun Of March 7, 2022. At that time, the probe is 46 million miles (75 million kilometers) from the Sun, placing it roughly halfway between Earth and starsaccording to ESA see press. Launched in February 2020, the Solar Orbiter makes a series of eccentric solar orbits as it gets closer to our parent star.
The 25 frames, captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), offer an unprecedented view of the Sun. EUI captures images at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The ESA said it was the highest resolution image ever taken of the full disk of the Sun and its corona, or upper atmosphere.
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High resolution, indeed. The stunning mosaic image is made up of a 9,148 by 9,112 pixel grid, which according to the ESA is 10 times better than a 4K television. That equates to a staggering 83 million pixels. ESA has provided interactive graphics which allows you to move across the scene, and you can zoom in and out to pick up some of the finer details. High resolution images, which I already use as desktop wallpaper, can be found here.
On the top right and bottom left, eerie dark filaments can be seen. These filaments can produce powerful eruptions, in which large amounts of coronal gas are ejected into space. This explosion, if aimed at Earth, sometimes creates solar storms around our atmosphere.
Another Solar Orbiter instrument, Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE), also provided meaningful data. SPICE peered deeper into the Sun, in the lower layer known as the chromosphere, which is done by scanning different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light produced by different atoms.
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In the newly released SPICE gifthe purple region corresponds to hydrogen gas at temperatures reaching 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees Celsius), green to oxygen at 576,000 degrees F (320,000 degrees C), and yellow to neon at 1.13 million degrees F (630,000 degrees C).
A great benefit of SPICE is that it allows scientists to link explosions at the surface to these deeper layers and to investigate the odd observation that the Sun’s surface, about 9,000 degrees F (5,000 degrees C) is actually cooler than its surroundings corona, which can reach 1.8 million degrees F (1 million degrees C).
Interestingly, the Solar Orbiter now only a few more days to make it Sun’s first near passwhich will happen on March 26, 2022. All 10 the probe instrument will be active at that point, as the ESA scientists try to squeeze as much data out of the flyby as possible. The Solar Orbiter is now in an orbit that brings it closer to the Sun than Mercury. The probe is getting closer Over the next few years, while also gradually increasing its orientation, which will allow us to glimpse the polar regions of the Sun.
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