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The sun may too bright and too powerful for us to look at with the naked eye, even from nearly 92 million miles away on Earth, but a solar orbiter recently got an unprecedented up-close glimpse of the star.
The European Space Agency last week released four stunning images that show the sun in all its fiery glory. The images, obtained in March 2023 by the ESA’s Solar Orbiter, represent what the agency claims are the highest-resolution views of the sun’s surface, known as the photosphere, to date.
The Solar Orbiter, which launched in February 2020, imaged the sun’s surface from less than 46 million miles away – or about halfway between the sun and Earth. All taken within about four hours on the same day, the new images show the sun from multiple perspectives, revealing its many layers in striking detail.
The spacecraft’s instruments captured the sun’s grainy surface in visible light while also mapping its magnetic field, tracking the direction hot material on the surface is flowing and snapping a mesmerizing image in ultraviolet light of the sun’s outermost layer, known as the corona.
Because the orbiter was so close on its solar pass-by, the spacecraft tilted and rotated to image each part of the sun’s face. The ESA then stitched together a mosaic of visuals to create composite imagery displaying the sun’s full disc.
Here’s what to know about the new images, and what each one shows.
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UV image shows the sun’s corona
The image of the sun’s corona, assembled from high-resolution images taken by the orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, shows active sunspot regions with protruding glowing plasma is seen protruding out.
Magnetic field lines often connect neighboring sunspots, which are the source of solar eruptions. The plasma, or charged gas, has a temperature of around 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Sunspots look like dark holes
The rest of the images were assembled by the spacecraft’s Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI). This instrument not only takes images in visible light, but also measures the direction of the magnetic field and maps how fast and in which direction different parts of the surface are moving.
The image above reveals the glowing, churning hot plasma comprising the sun’s so-called surface, or photosphere.
Almost all radiation from the sun is emitted from this layer, which has a temperature between about 8,100 and 11,000 degrees. Beneath the layer, the hot, dense plasma moved in ways not unlike magma in Earth’s mantle, which gives the sun its grainy appearance.
In this image, the sunspots look more like dark spots, or holes, on an otherwise smooth surface because they are colder regions that therefore send out less light.
Magnetic map shows areas around sunspots
A magnetic map, or “magnetogram,” shows the sun’s magnetic field is concentrated within and around sunspots.
The strong magnetic field explains why sunspots and the plasma inside them are colder than their surroundings. Convection typically moves heat from inside the sun to the surface, but the process is disrupted here by charged particles that are forced to instead follow the dense magnetic field.
Velocity map shows movement of material on the sun’s surface
A velocity map shows the speed and direction that material at the sun’s surface is moving.
Blue shows movement towards the Solar Orbiter, while red indicates movement away from the spacecraft. This map shows that while the plasma on the surface of the sun generally rotates with the sun’s overall spin around its axis, it is pushed outward around the sunspots.
Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]
