The Solar Orbiter mission, led by the European Space Agency ESA, reached the Sun on October 12 at a distance of just 29% of the distance from Earth to the Sun. The next day, it acquired images of the Sun’s corona, the resolution highest an instrument has ever taken.
Every single pixel in this video covers 105 kilometers of the Sun’s surface. This means that if this instrument looked at the Earth from this distance, our entire planet would be only 120 pixels wide. And that means 17 Terre would fit this image side by side.
Sunny weather
The solar corona is the outer atmosphere of our star. The video shows her in a very calm state – she is almost static, only small changes appear on her – minor, of course, in the context of the gigantic size of the image. A corona is said to be quiescent when there is little noticeable solar activity, such as coronal mass eruptions or ejections.
Yet activity is clearly visible there: an electrically charged gas known as plasma is in constant motion here, driven and accelerated by changes in the Sun’s magnetic field. The bright plasma arcs in the video are supported by rings of magnetism rising into the corona. from within the sun.
The Sun is currently preparing for the peak of its activity, the so-called solar maximum, which will occur in 2025. Therefore, views of the quiescent corona are likely to become increasingly rare in the coming years.
Not just a beautiful view
Although the video is extremely impressive, it is primarily an important source of information for scientists – the so-called solar wind is created in the corona. This flow of charged particles passes through the Solar System and has a significant effect on it, and thus on the Earth. But scientists still don’t know the exact mechanism of how this happens; the investigation of this phenomenon is a key topic for solar physicists and one of the main scientific objectives of the Solar Orbiter probe.
