A European Space Agency spacecraft has captured new video of the Sun’s surface, showing plasma swirling on the star’s “otherworldly” surface, according to a press release from the organization.
The ESA said the images were captured by Solar Orbiter, which was launched in February 2020 and has spent the last few years releasing images of its location close to the sun. The probe also obtained the closest images of the Sun and its polar regions, ESA said online.
The new images were taken as the orbiter “filmed the transition from the Sun’s lower atmosphere to the much hotter outer corona” on September 27, 2023, ESA said.
In the video, the sun’s surface appears covered in a dark yellow material as golden rays pass overhead. The hair-like structures are made of plasma, which follow the magnetic fields emerging from the sun’s interior. The descending structures are spicules, spirals of gas that can reach a height of more than 6,000 miles. The “exquisite detail” of the images is different from previous photos of the area.
Visible in the bottom left corner of the video is a feature the ESA calls “coronal moss,” which typically appears at the base of objects that are too hot for cameras to see.
In addition to the structures, the orbiter even captured an eruption on the surface of the Sun. The event appears small, appearing in the middle of the video at around 20 seconds, but ESA said the eruption is larger than that of Earth. During the eruption, cooler material – which appears darker and absorbs the sun’s radiation – is lifted up and then falls again.
The eruption is followed by a refreshing coronal rain. The rain, which is made of clumps of plasma that fall back to the Sun’s surface, is “probably less” than 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the agency said, and appears dark against the large coronal loops, which are around 1,800,032 degrees Fahrenheit.
The never-before-seen images were released as part of the spacecraft’s mission to learn more about the sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was also examining the Sun on the same day the video was taken, measuring particles and the magnetic field around the star. The two missions even worked together to measure the solar wind blowing in the area, ESA said.
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