The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter probe has taken photographs of the Sun’s surface showing small flickering flames that ESA refers to as ‘campfires’.
These are the first images of the solar surface taken with one of the three telescopes of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager of the Solar Orbiter. The probe was located on the perihelion, the point in the elliptical orbit closest to the sun, when the pictures were taken. The speed at that time is comparable to the speed of rotation of the sun and the conditions are favorable for taking pictures. At that point in its 168-day journey around the sun, the Solar Orbiter was 77 million kilometers from the flaming celestial body. Earth is located about 150 million kilometers from the sun.
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According to David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, principal investigator of the EUI telescope, the campfires can be compared to the large solar flares seen from Earth, but a million to a billion times smaller. Scientists do not yet know whether the small flickers are really small versions of the solar flares, or whether they are caused by completely different mechanisms. Researchers do speculate that they contribute to the high temperature of the solar corona and the solar wind.
The images show structures on the solar corona with a diameter of 400 kilometers. It is the first time that a telescope has captured images so close to the sun and ESA’s goal is to bring the Solar Orbiter even closer to the solar surface in the future for even higher resolution images. The images were taken on May 30 using extreme ultraviolet light, with a wavelength of 17 nanometers.
The Solar Orbiter also has the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager on board, which maps the magnetic fields of the sun. Powerful magnetic fields can form the basis of solar winds, which send charged particles into space that can disrupt conditions on earth, for example, telecom and electricity networks. The Solar Orbiter was able to observe an active region on the Sun that cannot be observed from Earth. It is the first time that the magnetic fields at the back of the sun have been measured, Sami Solanki says from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.
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