The newest photographs from the Solar Orbiter have revealed the sun in unparalleled detail. The UK-made spacecraft shot the images on March 7 after passing directly between the Earth and the sun.
The extreme ultraviolet imager (EUI) captured one of the photographs of the highest resolution image of the sun's complete disc and outer atmosphere - the corona - ever taken.
European Space Agency (ESA) said via News Chain that another image produced by the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument is the first entire Sun image in 50 years and the finest ever taken.
Reports say SPICE is designed to trace the layers in the sun's atmosphere from the corona, down to a layer known as the chromosphere, getting closer to the surface.
Scientists will be able to investigate what causes strong eruptions on the star's surface and how this affects space weather, thanks to such thorough observations.
The Sun as seen by Solar Orbiter in extreme ultraviolet light from a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres. The image is a mosaic of 25 individual images taken on 7 March by the high resolution telescope of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument.
Solar Orbiter Takes 25 Sun Photos In Four Hours
Solar Orbiter's EUI had to take 25 separate photos to capture the complete solar disk due to Solar Orbiter's near closeness to the sun, according to a statement that ESA provided.
According to ESA, the EUI crew took four hours to collect all of the segments since each shot took ten minutes, including the time it took to repoint the spacecraft.
Solar Orbiter's photos also revealed the temperature gradient throughout the sun's atmosphere.
One of the sun's greatest mysteries is the peculiar thermal behavior of its atmosphere.
The sun's atmosphere is significantly hotter at higher altitudes than at lower altitudes, rather than growing cooler with distance.
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While the sun's surface temperature is "only" approximately 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,000 degrees Celsius), the corona, or outer atmosphere, reaches over 1.8 million degrees F. (1 million degrees C).
Individual layers of the Sun's atmosphere were revealed by SPICE observations, starting with the chromosphere at 18,000 degrees F (10,000 degrees C) and rising to 1,130,000 degrees F (630,000 degrees C) in regions of the corona.
Scientists detected small solar flares called campfires in photographs taken by Solar Orbiter during its first near encounter in June 2020.
Scientists think these campfires, predicted by the recently dead solar physicist Eugene Parker, might explain the strange warmth.
Daily Mail said dark filaments might protrude away from the surface at the 2 o'clock and 8 o'clock locations on the Sun's edges.
These 'prominences' tend to explode and release massive amounts of coronal gas into space, causing "space weather" events.
The photos collected as the Solar Orbiter crossed between the sun and Earth can be used as a comparison in the future to calibrate with Earth-based observatories.
New, Better Photos Soon!
Better photos will be available soon. Ground control teams have been steadily narrowing Solar Orbiter's course around the star at the core of our solar system since the spacecraft's launch in February 2020.
Solar Orbiter's two previous perihelions - the points in the spacecraft's elliptical orbit closest to the Sun - occurred at nearly half the distance between the Sun and Earth (47.8 million miles or 77 million kilometers), but it is now on its way to a considerably closer encounter.
ESA's Solar Orbiter deputy project scientist Yannis Zouganelis told Space.com that the spacecraft will fly past the Sun at a distance of only 30 million miles (48.3 million kilometers) on March 26 at 7:50 a.m. EDT, roughly a third of the sun-Earth distance.
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