VIDEO Solar Orbiter captures an unprecedented view of the solar corona

Oct. 27 () –

The Solar Orbiter mission, led by ESA, has experienced its second close encounter with the Sunwith an unprecedented resolution view of our star’s calm corona.

The moment of closest approach took place on October 12 at 19:12 UTC, when the spacecraft was only 29% of the distance from Earth to the Sun.

A film released by ESA comes from October 13, when the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) returned the highest resolution sequence of the calm corona ever taken with any instrument.

Each pixel in this movie spans 105 km above the Sun’s surface. This means that if EUI were looking at Earth from this distance, our entire planet would span just 120 pixels across. The film itself is 2,048 wide, which means 17 Earths would fit side by side in this image.

The corona is the outer atmosphere of the Sun. It is called calm when there is little appreciable solar activity, such as flares or coronal mass ejections. This film, and others taken during the meeting, they show the dynamic nature of the Sun’s million-degree hot corona. The electrically charged gas here, known as plasma, is in constant motion, guided and accelerated by changes in the Sun’s magnetic field. The glowing plasma arcs in the film are held in place by loops of magnetism that burst into the corona from the interior of the Sun.

Currently, the Sun is reaching a peak in its activity levels, known as solar maximum, in 2025. Therefore, views of a quiet corona are likely to become rarer in the coming years, informs the ESA.

The Sun sends out a solar wind of particles that flows through the Solar System. It originates in the crown, but the precise mechanism by which this happens is poorly understood. Investigating this phenomenon is a key focus for solar physicists and one of Solar Orbiter’s main science goals.

This particular encounter benefited from Solar Orbiter flying rapidly in the direction of Earth.. This allowed much more data to be downloaded. It also allowed for coordinated observations of solar features with ground-based telescopes, starting on October 21.

“I look forward to the data from all ten instruments being downloaded over the next few weeks, and then the global scientific community will be very busy discovering new things using this unique datasetsays Daniel Müller, ESA’s project scientist for Solar Orbiter.

Solar Orbiter is an international collaborative space mission between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.