The United Kingdom-built spacecraft's nearest approach to the Sun, also called the "perihelion," occurred in late March, taking it inside the orbit of Mercury, at roughly one-third the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
Powerful flares and a "curious patch of spikes" that stretched 15,000 miles across the Sun called "the hedgehog" are among the most recent images from the Solar Orbiter, a Mail Online report specified.
The Sun as you've never seen it before: Incredible new Solar Orbiter images show a curious patch of 'spikes' stretching 15,000 miles across the sun dubbed the HEDGEHOG https://t.co/PbMRiCvP0F
— KulganofCrydee 🎗️🇮🇱🇬🇧 (@KulganofCrydee) May 19, 2022
It captured a set of "breathtaking" images, which include views across the solar poles and numerous solar flares, providing a taste of real-time space weather forecasting.
Such an occurrence is becoming increasingly essential because of space weather's threat to both technology and astronauts.
Captured by the Solar Orbiter
A similar Yahoo! News report said that another stunning characteristic the Solar Orbiter captured was called the hedgehog due to its multitude of spikes of hot as well as colder gas reaching out in all directions.
Not only are many learning from the images sent back by Solar Orbiter, but from what it feels like as it gets nearer the Sun, which includes solar flares and a recent CME or coronal mass ejection.
Essentially, the Solar Orbiter carries ten science instruments. Nine of these instruments are led by member states of the European Space Agency and one by NASA, all working together to offer a remarkable understanding of how the Sun is working.
The main scientific goal of the orbiter is to explore the association between the Sun and the heliosphere, the space's large bubble extending beyond the planets of the Solar System.
'Solar Corona'
The Solar Orbiter is filled with electrically charged particles, most of which have been discharged by the Sun to form the solar wind.
It is these particles' movement, as well as the associated solar magnetic field, that produces space weather. The next, and a little closer, perihelion pass will occur on October 13 at 0.29 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Before that, on September 4, it is expected to make its third flyby of Venus.
David Berghmans from the Royal Observatory of Belgium hailed the images as "really breathtaking." He is also the principal investigator of the extreme ultraviolet imager or EUI instrument, which captures high-resolution images of the lower layers of the atmosphere of the Sun, called the "Solar Corona," which is described in a related Forbes report.
Now, the task for the EUI team is to understand what they have seen. This is a difficult task since Solar Orbiter shows so much activity on the Sun at a small scale.
Having seen a characteristic or an occurrence that they cannot recognize right away, the research team must then dig through previous solar observations by other space missions to find out if anything similar has been spotted before.
According to Berghmans, "even if Solar Orbiter stopped taking data tomorrow," he would be busy for years trying to figure all these things out.
Related information about the solar orbiter is shown on The Telegraph's YouTube video below:
Check out more news and information on the Sun in Science Times.
