See the sun revealed in stunning glory by Solar Orbiter pictures
The best pictures we have of the sun yet have been delivered thanks to the Solar Orbiter spacecraft
By Alex Wilkins
20 November 2024
The sun’s upper atmosphere, or corona, in ultraviolet light
ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team
These fiery images are the clearest views we have ever had of the sun, taken by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft.
Solar Orbiter, a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, is the most advanced instrument to orbit the sun and has been sending back information to Earth since it arrived there in 2020.
These images were captured in March 2023, when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the sun. The picture above was taken using ultraviolet light, revealing the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, in extreme detail and showing the roiling, 1 million °C plasma blasting out along the sun’s magnetic field lines. The bright light from the sun’s surface normally hides the corona, so the corona can normally only been seen if you block out visible light, which happens during an eclipse, or just look using ultraviolet light, say.
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To create this full image of the sun’s corona, many smaller zoomed-in pictures had to be stitched together, resulting in this full mosaic consisting of 8000 pixels. In the future, we will get two high-resolution pictures of the sun like this from the Solar Orbiter each year, according to ESA.
The sun in visible light taken by the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/PHI Team
This second image is what the surface, or photosphere, of the sun looks like when viewed by the Solar Orbiter in visible light, the same light we can see with our eyes. This layer of the sun has a temperature of between about 4500 and 6000°C. The dark regions here are sunspots, which are cooler than the surrounding areas and emit less light.
