Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

See the ‘quiet’ of the sun’s corona in Solar Orbiter footage

Georgina Torbet
By

Solar Orbiter, the European Space Agency (ESA) mission that launched in 2020 and which includes the closest camera to the sun, has made a second close approach of our star and has captured stunning footage of the sun’s corona.

Solar Orbiter’s unprecedented view of the quiet corona

The spacecraft made its closest approach on 12 October at 21:12 EST, when it came within less than one-third of the distance between Earth and the sun. Using its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument it captured this video of the corona on October 13.

Recommended Videos

The corona is the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, and it stretches out for millions of miles from the sun’s surface. It is also hotter than the surface of the sun, reaching temperatures over a million degrees Celsius.

Related

At the time the images of the corona were taken, it was described as “quiet,” meaning that there were no flares or coronal mass ejections occurring. Even so, the corona is active and changing as the extremely hot plasma moves around due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field. This relative calm will be less common in the coming months and years as the sun’s activity is currently increasing and is set to peak in 2025 when it reaches a point called the solar maximum. This is the most active point in the 11-year cycle of solar activity.

The images captured by the EUI instrument cover 65 miles per pixel, so the total image represents an area equivalent to 17 Earths stacked side by side. Solar Orbiter is also armed with a variety of other instruments for both remote sensing and taking in-situ measurements which record data such as magnetic fields, radio and plasma waves, and various types of imagery.

More data from the close approach will be coming over the next weeks as the spacecraft is traveling in the direction of Earth and so can downlink more data. “I am very much looking forward to data from all 10 instruments being downloaded during the next few weeks, and then the worldwide science community will be very busy discovering new things using this unique data set,” said Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter, in a statement.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Remarkable imagery shows NASA probe as it’s hit by a solar storm
A mid-level solar flare that peaked at 8:13 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1, 2015, captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

A NASA spacecraft captured incredible imagery as it flew through an eruption from the sun recently. Pictures beamed back to scientists on Earth even show the fiery ejection "vacuuming up" space dust left over from the formation of the solar system.

The fly-through by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took place on September 5 and NASA shared the imagery (below) on Monday.

Read more
Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe work together on a puzzle about our sun
Artist's impression of Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe.

One of the biggest puzzles about our sun is a strange one: you might think that it would be hottest right at the surface, but in fact, that isn't the case. The corona, or the sun's outer atmosphere, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface. It's still not clear exactly what that should be the case, so it's an issue that solar missions are keen to research.

Artist's impression of Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe. Solar Orbiter: ESA/ATG medialab; Parker Solar Probe: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Read more
Scientists ‘hack’ Solar Orbiter’s camera to get a better look at the sun
Scientists have used the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) in a new mode of operation to record part of the Sun’s atmosphere that has been almost impossible to image until now. By covering the Sun’s bright disc with an ‘occulter’ inside the instrument, EUI can detect the million-times fainter ultraviolet light coming from the surrounding corona.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft is performing a long series of flybys of various planets to bring it closer and closer to the sun on each pass. It will eventually come within 26 million miles to observe the sun up close, and enter in the orbit of Mercury. It will be the closet a camera has ever gotten to the sun, in order to take detailed images of the sun's corona and its local environment.

A new way to view the Sun

Read more