Oh my God! This is a close-up view of the sun
Amaze you! This is what the sun looks like from a close distance. Photo: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter /EUI Team
- Seeing the Sun from Earth is commonplace. But have you ever seen the Sun from such a close distance that you can observe all the activity in its atmosphere very clearly?
This view was captured by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter vehicle on September 23, 2023. Using the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, the Solar Orbiter vehicle recorded activity in the corona or uppermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere. In the 30 second video shared by ESA, you can see some amazing astronomical phenomena. The first is 'coronal moss', a brightly glowing gas that creates lace-like patterns in the Sun's atmosphere.
Coronal moss is usually found around the center of sunspots where magnetic conditions are very strong. This strange structure has a temperature so hot that it cannot be detected by some research instruments.
Next there are 'spicules' that appear along the horizon. Spicules are tall columns of gas that rise from the Sun's chromosphere. This structure can have a height of up to 10,000 km, higher than the peak of Mount Everest which reaches a height of 8,848 km.
After that there was a small eruption that appeared around the 20th second. Even though the ESA calls it a small eruption, in fact this explosion was much bigger than Earth's.
The video also shows coronal rain made of high-density plasma plumes. Don't compare rain on the Sun with that on Earth, because the temperature of this coronal rain reaches 10,000 degrees Celsius.
But that temperature is not much because large coronal loops (the brightest parts near coronal rain) have temperatures of up to one million degrees Celsius, as quoted from Cnet, Monday (6/5/2024).
When taking this video, the Solar Orbiter probe was about a third of the total distance between Earth and the Sun, or about 0.33 astronomical units (AU). For comparison, the average distance between Mercury and the Sun is about 0.39 AU.
This distance is very close, but the Solar Orbiter will still continue to approach the Sun. This spacecraft will reach its closest distance to the Sun of around 43 million km or 0.287 AU on October 7. It is not impossible that the video taken by the Solar Orbiter from such a close distance will be even more amazing.